Electronic Book Review - cold warhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/cold-war-0
enAgainst an Aesthetics of Disappearance (review of Timothy Melley's The Covert Sphere)http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/covert
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Fabienne Collignon</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2013-12-27</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><strong><em>The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. </em>Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012.</strong></p>
<p>Melley’s book on the covert sphere begins with a subsection titled “Cold War Redux,” indicative of one of the general premises that his study rests on, though “rests” is the wrong word: Melley’s investigation is about the remains of the Cold War, most notably in relation to the “paradoxical epistemology” (2) of the secret state. This means that Melley is, first of all, attentive to how the “war on terror” continues the politics and disposition of the Cold War, the lines of thought that spin fictions of “a distant and mysterious enemy” in circumstances of “pure” or permanent war, characterized through an “open-ended “peacetime” mobilization, extreme domestic hypervigilance, and a massive program for covert action” (3). Melley’s thesis, at heart, follows on from Paul Virilio’s description of “pure war”—the infinite preparation for war—even though Virilio’s presence is only spectral in <strong><em>The Covert Sphere</em></strong>: the explicit concerns that unsettle the book relate more to Giorgio Agamben’s treatise on the state of exception, situated in a precarious, uncertain position between democracy and absolutism, while it also engages with Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere. It is an investigation that, like Agamben’s extraordinary State of Exception, is motivated by the urgent necessity to refuse and criticize the prevailing terms of the “war on terror,” an effort that encompasses, on the one hand, the prerequisite to dispense with discourses of Cold War endings and, by extension, “victories”and, on the other, attempts to formulate an argument seeking to locate political resistance to this state of exception or covert sphere. These terms have now roughly merged; the one nestles inside the other: Melley notes that “the covert sector has increasingly become a version of the state itself,” with its “own bureaucracies” and territories: “the remote airstrips, Guantánamo Bay, rendition sites,” that together form the “instrumental sedimentation” (5) of the National Security State.</p>
<p>The book’s objective, however, is not a process of “uncovering” such “sedimentations” with a view—naive at best or else, catastrophically, offering a false exit—to “‘[heal]’ the wounded public sphere,” nor to posit the latter as “a transparent, democratic ideal” that exists in opposition to that other domain, suspended, as Agamben observes, in a void instigated by the deactivation and standstill of the force of law. Melley’s project, rather, starts—like Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel <strong><em>Gravity’s Rainbo</em><em>w</em></strong>—with a “progressive knotting into” (2000: 3): the “rational democracy” whose preservation depends on “psychological operations” (7) that gradually transform government and the structure of the Habermasian public sphere as locus of reason. This merger, between the rational and covert spheres, calls into question the very foundations, processes, and terminology of so-called democratic states; to follow Agamben—because Melley’s book functions as a continuation of an absolutely fundamental interrogation of current political structures—democracy itself, as a system of government, becomes unclassifiable. This is essentially what Melley means when he talks about the “strange epistemology” of the covert sphere, defined as “an array of discursive forms and cultural institutions through which the public can “discuss” or, more exactly, fantasize the clandestine dimensions of the state” (5). Marked as irrational—the covert sphere as dreamworld—this zone is also paradoxically open: “[t]he secret is that there is no secret—or […] that the most important secrets are public secrets” (22). Such statements further emphasize the impossibility to set up simple partitions between open and closed, or public and covert, systems while they further gesture towards the larger, disturbing matters that arise in states whose ostensible survival depends on black ops and juridically exceptional orders. To cite Agamben: “the clean opposition of democracy and dictatorship is misleading for any analysis of the governmental paradigms dominant today” (2005: 48).</p>
<p>That is, then, the network of thought that <em><strong>The Covert Sphere</strong></em> belongs to, situating itself in an intellectual practice informed by Agamben, whose study on the state of exception prompts an inquiry into the possibilities of political engagement:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;">Only if the veil covering this ambiguous zone [e.g. the state of exception] is lifted will we be able to approach an understanding of the stakes involved in the difference—or the supposed difference—between the political and the juridical, and between law and the living being. And perhaps only then will it be possible to answer the question that never ceases to reverberate in this history of Western politics: what does it mean to act politically? (2005: 2)</p>
<p><em><strong>The Covert Sphere</strong></em> does something similar, if less explicitly so; the impulse to analyse the cultural imaginary of the National Security State in itself attests to the political, as well as ethical, endeavour that informs, silently or otherwise, Melley’s book. Even though apparently bleak, the study—which refrains from declarations or imperatives of strategies to adopt in order to counter the devastating forces at work, globally, today—it is at heart committed to a spirit of radical critique that “reverberate[s]” throughout this study. There is, perhaps, no need to state such a purpose or philosophy, which is, after all, already glimpsed in the introduction by raising Agamben’s work, whose influence extends way beyond brief references. It is with this aspect in mind that Melley’s book needs to be approached; the critical tradition that it operates within obviously exists in conjunction to an argument that, on the face of it, submits no clear vectors of resistance. Yet to interpret it in a light of an unhappy but exitless narrative of resignation is to miss the point, which lies less in the articulation than in an application of a process of thought that insists on a critical, uncompromising response to the state of emergency. “[W]e have institutionalized undemocratic means of preserving our democracy” (222): the book’s last sentence, though clearly not a concrete proposal, nonetheless locates responsibility with us—collectively, individually—who have participated in, and continue to collaborate with, a system of pretended innocence and victimization.</p>
<p>If this understanding echoes Žižek, then that is deliberate; Žižek figures in <em><strong>The Covert Sphere</strong></em> in ways that relate to the analysis of fantasy formations as soothing systems: insulations that sheathe empire in victimhood and that invite a curious subject-position of “active not-knowing” (8). In his response to the World Trace Centre attacks of 11 September 2001, Žižek notes that the “only possible solution” to becoming a participant in state rhetoric, unthinkingly accepting fallacious oppositions, is to “adopt both positions”—in this case condemnation and, conversely, an emphasis on the causes of the attacks—”simultaneously”:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;">from a moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime, this very innocence, however, is not innocent—to adopt such an “innocent” position in today’s capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction. (2002: 50)</p>
<p>Melley’s study acts in accordance to this task, that is, by renouncing the possibility of “an ‘innocent’ position” and by considering the curious “regime of half-knowledge” (8) that defines the covert sphere. Melley, like Žižek, acknowledges the seductions of such systems, which Melley interprets, with reference to Donald Pease’s work, as American exceptionalism, an “ideological and discursive framework” whose “vitality” (13) can only be understood and resisted through an approach that conceptualises ideology “as a matter of action rather than knowledge” (14). This type of reading indicates Žižek”s influence: collaboration in ideological structures occurs on the level of a “belief through actions” (14) or a frantic activity that, to quote from <em><strong>Welcome to the Desert of the Real</strong></em>, “conceals a more fundamental immobility” (2002: 7). At the same time, this mobilization prevents a sustained engagement with the existing order, which might be cynically or ironically dismissed without halting the process by which we persist in acting according to its regulations/dreamworlds:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;">Within a powerful enough fantasy, simply knowing that something is wrong is not enough to change behaviour. Indeed, the cynicism that was once the hallmark of enlightened ideology critique is for Žižek the very essence of contemporary ideology, for cynicism (“I know very well what is wrong, but there is nothing I can do”) results in the same inaction as classical ideological delusion (“nothing is wrong, all is well”). (14)</p>
<p>Even such disavowal of belief ensures ideological persistence, whose fictions create the afore-mentioned “regime of half-knowledge”—”I know very well, but”—which also “makes government secrecy tolerable because it offers the public the opportunity to proclaim its official ignorance” (75). As such, the position that warrants most attention in this book is declarations of innocence, standing against the politics of responsibility that Melley argues for throughout his study. Yet, bearing in mind an earlier point, this reading practice is not nostalgic, in that it wishes to return to the notion of a rational public sphere that stands opposed to the “heart of darkness” (75) that is the state of emergency. Here, the Habermasian notion of the public domain becomes important, though Melley takes issue with the lines of separation that Habermas draws between his “primary concern”, namely “the rise of pathological forms of publicity” that leads to “the “refeudalization” of society” (32) and the growth of state secrecy, both of which prompt, to varying degrees, the emergence of an idealised public “reason”. This argument, as Melley notes, raises Adorno and Horkheimer’s perspective on the mass media entertainment industry and its efforts to automatize and homogenize consumer-subjects; the bourgeois public sphere, also traditionally masculine and relatively wealthy, according to Habermas forms largely in response to spectacle rather than the rule of secrecy—a disjointing that Melley challenges. At the risk of repetition, <em><strong>The Covert Sphere</strong></em>’s line of reasoning, time and again, relates to areas of intersection—some of which this review has neglected to mention, such as the crises of legitimacy shared by democracies and postmodernity, another central tenet of this book—to the point that each supposedly separate territory and terminology are thrown into doubt. There is, then, no desire to regain a Habermasian or idealized sphere of reason but instead Melley’s study offers a severe critique of such a concept in that this “enlightened” ambit is essentially exclusive, and that any lament of its vanishing or compromise mourns a lost phallic agency: a “crisis of masculinity” is “connected to the transformation of Cold War democracy” (10).</p>
<p>Across its chapters, <em><strong>The Covert Sphere</strong></em> addresses this crisis, which Melley describes as “agency panic” elsewhere: brainwashing as “nightmare of masculinity undone” (47), whose assault destabilizes the premise of American exceptionalist fictions of autonomy; fantastic retreats into hermetically sealed spaces as sites of male agency (122); the “terror of an omnipotent but feminizing security apparatus” that, in reference to Freud’s case subject Daniel Paul Schreber, desires to turn men into “bride[s]” (205). The hard singularity of the American man-subject falls apart, so that recent “geopolitical melodramas,” though often ostensibly interrogating the National Security State, end up replicating “narcissistic [fantasies] of domestic danger and heroic self-defence” (203). It is this last chapter that most obviously attends to the legacies of the Cold War in the current “war on terror,” though the other sections—because of the refusal to declare endings, moments of rupture—similarly comment, if less palpably, on these remains and incorporations. The focus, in these last pages, is the obliteration of “foreign perspectives” (202) in favour of a vantage point that is wholly American, concerned with inside damage rather than the devastations caused abroad, somewhere else. The narratives of these “geopolitical melodramas”—examples evidently comprise the television series 24, but also Patriot Games, both of which articulate “a defence of pragmatic illegal action” (210)—tend to function as ultimate support for, and justification of, the state of exception, whose “feminizing” influence requires figures of steel and iron will as bulwarks against the threat of masculine dissolution. In this vein, the security apparatus itself, though at risk of going haywire, only poses a danger to US citizens—which can, further, be curtailed through “heroic male agency” (209)—but whose functioning as “tool of empire” (214) is obfuscated. The result is that such fictions, in evidence also in official policy, provide yet further evidence of an “infrastructure that […] “disappear[s]” the dirty work of empire and preserve[s] the fantasy of exceptionalism” (201) that the covert sphere transfers from the Cold War to the “war on terror.” To cite Melley at greater length in an attempt to conclude a project that is really just beginning:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;">The fantasy of solipsistic enclosure is not only a representation of US privilege but also of US half-knowledge. It represents the ideological system that keeps US citizens from confronting the facts of US empire and its attended privileges. The recognition and disavowal of this system is what inspires the fantasy of self-destruction. The catastrophe fantasy is a return of the repressed knowledge that US citizens are sheltered—physically and epistemologically—from the horrors that occur in so many other places in the world. (217)</p>
<p>The functioning of these policies of empire—very real in their effects on the dispossessed failed by their own state—vanishes in a masturbatory, gadget-loving system whose revelations of abuse yield “something like “infantile amnesia”—an ahistorical numbness to certain facts of US empire” (81). This, too, leads back to a position of false innocence, which operates purely because of a strategic forgetting, that condition of “half-knowledge”, a kind of stupor that cannot engage with, or reflect on, the measures employed by the state of exception—procedures that though by definition provisional, have become indefinite. This is the reason Melley’s book is indispensable; it belongs to a project and politics of total recall, trying to act against a regime of memory erasure/manipulation in order to keep alert to special kinds of exceptional law and policies perpetuating fantasises of empire.</p>
<p>Works Cited</p>
<p>Agamben, Girogio. <strong><em>State of Exception</em></strong>. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.</p>
<p>Pynchon, Thomas.<strong><em> Gravity’s Rainbow</em></strong>. 1973. London and New York: Vintage, 2000.</p>
<p>Žižek, Slavoj. <em><strong>Welcome to the Desert of the Real</strong>.</em> London and New York: Verso, 2002</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/cold-war-0">cold war</a>, <a href="/tags/ideology">ideology</a>, <a href="/tags/national-security-state">National Security State</a>, <a href="/tags/empire">empire</a>, <a href="/tags/fantasy">fantasy</a>, <a href="/tags/state-exception">state of exception</a>, <a href="/tags/geopolitics">geopolitics</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernity">postmodernity</a></div></div></div>Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:53:46 +0000Ryan Brooks2267 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/covert#commentsSee the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Mediahttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/mammoth
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Stuart Moulthrop</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-10-12</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="lightEmphasis">This essay was first published by The MIT Press in 2009 in the collection <span class="work-title">Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives</span>, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.</span></p>
<h2>High Magic</h2>
<p>Comics belong to an interstitial form, occupying a privileged place between the dominant media of word and image. They are enough like long-form prose narrative for some to be known as <span class="lightEmphasis">graphic novels</span>, and they are first cousins to storyboards, important genetic material for most films. Indeed, as Scott McCloud suggests, a comic is a bit like a film reel with a slow playback rate (8). Yet we should also mark a crucial difference between comics and film: the separation of visual units by a gap or gutter, so that arrangement and disposition strongly influence interpretation. Unlike film frames, comic panels are presented not singly but in groups, one page-or in book form, one bifold spread-at a time. Turning the page of a comic book presents a simultaneous array of images and words, which readers break down into the conventional, right-left-top-bottom reading sequence inculcated by print. This scheme is often discarded by readers and comics creators alike, but exceptions tend to reinforce the basic rule. Reading comics generally involves dual modes: scanning the page grid, and then focusing attention on a particular region within it (McCloud 95).</p>
<p>McCloud rightly insists that a comic is not a hybrid or synthesis of two modes but something more like a suspension, where combined elements remain distinct. To some extent, this duality reflects the history of media and culture. As Lev Manovich points out, the “logic of industrial production” that emerged in the last two centuries promoted a sequential way of thinking about the world, and to express that worldview, it encouraged convenient forms of narrative, from journalism and novels to movies and television shows:</p>
<blockquote><p>This type of narrative turned out to be particularly incompatible with the spatial narrative that had played a prominent role in European visual culture for centuries. From Giotto’s fresco cycle at Capella degli Scrovegni in Padua to Courbet’s <span class="booktitle">A Burial at Ornans</span>, artists presented a multitude of separate events within a single space, whether the fictional space of a painting or the physical space that can be taken in by the viewer all at once … [S]patial narrative did not disappear completely in the 20th century, but rather, like animation, came to be delegated to a minor form of Western culture-comics. (322-323)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The historical nonconformity of comics may have more than academic interest. Keepers of the great traditions, as opposed to true critics like Manovich, have little time for “minor” practices. Meanwhile, those less attached to the cultural center find value at the margins. Take, for instance, Jimi Hendrix’s or Neil Young’s distortion-rich guitar styles from the late 1960s, or Grand Wizard Theodore’s invention of record scratching a decade later. The market masters have generally dismissed these techniques as gimmicks that define at best a limited niche-until those niches grow large enough to exploit. Meanwhile, a generation of grunge players and hip-hop artists hear possibilities for musical deconstruction, ways to fold back the conformations of media history. By flaunting outmoded, analog technologies like vacuum tubes and vinyl records, they expose and complicate the prevailing aesthetic of digital synthesis. Noise becomes interpretation.</p>
<p>“Minor forms” thus hold the seeds of major critique, especially when they play deliberately with ambiguity or doubleness. As Thomas Pynchon realized, there can be “high magic to low puns” (<span class="work-cited">Crying</span> 129). At any liminal point, or along an interface, value assignments tend to reverse: “everything bad is good for you,” as Steven Johnson polemically indicates (9). <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> offers an excellent case in point. By manipulating the interstices and invisible art of a medium that comes from the gutter, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have produced a work that reflects profoundly on space and sequence, and that, if read carefully, affords an important perspective on modern media.</p>
<h2>Beyond Your Wildest Imagining</h2>
<p><span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> was published in 1986-1987 as a twelve-issue series by DC Comics. Reissued as a trade paperback during the graphic-novel boom of the late 1980s, it has remained in print for twenty years, winning multiple awards and the praise of Marvel founder Stan Lee, who called it a milestone in the evolution of comics (<span class="booktitle">Wikipedia</span>). Moore, who conceived and scripted the project, originally thought about a multipart superhero story involving the Mighty Crusaders, characters developed in the 1950s and 1960s by MLJ-Archie Comics. He later adapted this concept to another defunct superhero line from the Charlton Comics house, which had been acquired by DC. <cite id="note_1" class="note">Traces of these origins survive as grace notes in <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>: Nite Owl’s airship is called Archie, and Walter Kovacs (Rorschach) spends his childhood in the Charlton Home for orphans. These may be “fanboy” details, as Moore calls them, but they also indicate how deep the texturing of allusion runs in his work.</cite> In the end, Moore was not able to use the Charlton characters, probably because DC planned to feature them in new comics, while Moore envisioned a closed story arc where some major figures would die. The result was an original world with its own dramatis personae (<span class="booktitle">Absolute</span> P#).</p>
<p>Moore has said he wanted to create “a superhero <span class="lightEmphasis">Moby-Dick</span>,” and indeed the work has been treated as a contemporary classic by both fans and scholars (<span class="booktitle">Wikipedia</span>). As its substantial entry in the Internet’s open encyclopedia attests, <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> blurs distinctions between popular and polite cultures, offering broadly accessible entertainment whose intricacy and technical sophistication invite careful study. <span class="booktitle">Wikipedia</span> cites four websites offering analysis of the work as well as a reconstruction of <span class="work-title">Tales of the Black Freighter</span>, <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>’s comic within a comic.</p>
<p>These projects demonstrate a strong affinity between <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> and what Yochai Benkler calls the emerging “folk culture” of the Internet (15). Steven Johnson argues that technologies for easy access and repetition, such as DVD players and video on demand, have led television producers to more complex narrative forms, from the ensemble style of <span class="work-title">Hill Street Blues</span> to the epic story arc of <span class="work-title">Babylon 5</span>. Johnson sees a developing trend from “least objectionable” to “most repeatable” programming (160-162). Graphic novels certainly fit this pattern, especially those as rich and demanding as <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. We might then propose yet another interstitial placement for this work, not between print and cinema, but between the old regimes of cinema and press and the electronic frontiers of the Net.</p>
<p><span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> offers an attractive framework or seedbed for Internet culture. Taking up this cue, in the early days of the World Wide Web, I deployed a reader’s guide or “digital companion” to the comic, noting that its narrative structure seemed well served by hyperlinked, multithreaded commentary (<span class="work-title">Watching the Detectives</span>). Five years later, as contributions from readers of the site accumulated, colleagues of mine reengineered the original site as a protowiki, streamlining the process of textual expansion. As we will see, this convergence of <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> with what Michael Joyce calls “constructive hypertext” (10-12) is far more than a coincidence of structural features and literary tastes. By illuminating the boundary zone between dominant and nonconforming media, <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> offers a great deal to those concerned with emerging textual practices.</p>
<p>Themes and design aside, however, the relationship between this artifact of the 1980s and the twenty-first century is not straightforward. Set in a fictional 1985 that contains several costumed crime fighters and one genuine superhuman, the story tracks an elaborate conspiracy to eliminate masked heroes, ushering in a new world order where problems must be addressed by more ordinary means.<cite id="note_2" class="note">This theme is a recurrent concern for Moore. An email from editor Pat Harrigan notes its appearance at the end of Moore’s Swamp Thing as well as in the unproduced Twilight of the Superheroes outline.</cite> The analogy to nuclear weapons seems clear enough, and the Moore and Gibbons emphasize it by identifying their superman as a walking “H-bomb” and excerpting a tract called Super Powers and the Superpowers (II.8.5).<cite id="note_3" class="note">Citations from <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> refer to the trade paperback edition (Moore and Gibbons 1987), which preserves the pagination of each monthly issue. References are given by chapter, page, and panel number, using the top-bottom, left-right graph order: II.8.5 thus refers to the fifth panel on page 8 of chapter 2. Each chapter of <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> closes with an excerpt from a fictional document. Citations for these sections are given as chapter, “Doc,” and local pagination of the document, not the chapter: XII.Doc.1 thus refers to the first page of the document included at the end of chapter XII.</cite> <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> is rooted in the waning days of the cold war, caricaturing the Reagan-Thatcher axis with a Nixon administration that survives Vietnam, Watergate, and the Twenty-second Amendment to rule for seventeen years. In one of many ironic flourishes, political speculations concerning a presidential bid by “RR” point to Robert Redford; Ronald Reagan is dismissed as a washed-up cowboy actor (XII.32.3-4).</p>
<p>Most of its satiric targets have drifted from history’s shooting gallery, but <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> remains powerfully resonant with recent times. The Bush gang of Washington “humanoids” learned deceit and subversion under Richard Nixon, giving their geopolitics of oil and terror a clear line of descent from the cold war (XI.Doc.1). <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>’s visions of hovering airships and free electricity cut the other way, ironically counterpointing our Gotterdammerung of fossil fuels and the general decline of our not-so-superpowers. There is a passing resemblance between Tony Blair and <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s arch-antivillain, Adrian Veidt-in features, political philosophy, and some would say, morals. This seems either prophetic (Blair was after all an important political actor in the 1980s) or in the strict sense <span class="lightEmphasis">weird</span>.</p>
<p>Yet such direct comparisons can only go so far. <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> presents an alternative history, diverging deliberately from the world we know. Tilting the prism another way, keen students of comics might thus try a different sort of thought experiment. What if our universe is the cartoon, and <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s four-color fantasy an image of higher reality? In this scheme, our recent governmental bungling might represent a Bizarro-world inversion of <span class="work-title">Watchmen’</span>s elegant, sinister intrigues. Veidt then would not be a type of Blair but rather an antitype of George W. Bush, who seems born to the part of Bizarro Superman.</p>
<p>These readings are admittedly fanciful, but there is at least one point of clear convergence between <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s universe and ours. Global warming, Middle Eastern conflict, and suicide bombers do not feature in this nightmare of more innocent times, but <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> does include one scene of chilling currency: a tableau of New York streets strewn with bleeding corpses (XII.6.1). Within the story, this moment horribly realizes a promotion for a fitness method invented by the conspirator Veidt: “I WILL GIVE YOU BODIES BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGINING” (X.13.1). Indeed he does. The bodies in question include both a cyclopean monster, purportedly an invader from another dimension, and thousands of civilians killed by a psychic blast when the phantom appears. The giant alien remains a figment of comics-or television, since its origins trace to an episode of the <span class="work-title">Outer Limits</span> series from the 1960s (XII.28.4). The heaps of victims, terrible to say, are not beyond anyone’s imagining these days. Moore and Gibbons place their ground zero some blocks north of ours, but it is still impossible to read the final chapter of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> without remembering that its lurid, apocalyptic fantasy came true, in some sense, fifteen years later.</p>
<p>If we are living on the Bizarro planet, it is possible to die there. Indeed, an especially dark resonance between <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> and real life arrived during the writing of this chapter. Brewing up their atmosphere of crisis, Moore and Gibbons make passing reference to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, part of the obsession with time and timepieces that serves as <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s white whale. In the first chapter, a newspaper headline reports that the clock “stands at 5 to 12” after the “American superman” suddenly vanishes, leaving the United States vulnerable to Soviet attack (I.18.4). Meanwhile, back in Bizarro reality, our own atomic scientists, including global warming for the first time in their deliberations, reset the clock on January 20, 2007, from 11:53 to, yes, 5 minutes before midnight (See <a href="http://www.thebulletin.org" title="Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" class="outbound">Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists</a>).</p>
<p>These days we all watch the clock, when we are not watching the <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>; but how can we truly understand the tenor and the terror of these times? Perhaps as Pynchon says, we have “always been at the movies,” but then again, if our world is largely a mechanical projection, the sequential narrative of cinema may not be the best way of seeing our predicament (<span class="work-title">Gravity’s</span> 760). Comics and spatial narrative may shed more useful light.</p>
<h2>Under Language</h2>
<p>The medium of comics provides a powerful way to interrogate a reality abundant with signs, symptoms, and synchronicities. As noted, comics are always inherently dualistic, playing off space and simultaneity against succession and sequence. In most cases, the panel of a comic does not fill the visual field but rather coexists with others in the structure of the page. Likewise, the various verbal elements of comics (e.g. word balloons, text boxes that simulate a voice-over) impinge on the graphical surface of every panel. In developing the script for <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>, Moore was acutely aware of these basic properties. He notes in a 1992 interview:</p>
<blockquote><p>What it comes down to in comics is that you have complete control of both the verbal track and the image track, which you don’t have in any other medium, including film. So a lot of effects are possible which simply cannot be achieved anywhere else. You control the words and the pictures-and more importantly-you control the <span class="lightEmphasis">interplay</span> between those two elements in a way which not even film can achieve. There’s a sort of “under-language” at work there, that is, neither the “visuals” nor the “verbals,” but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two. (Wiater and Bissette 163)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Happily, Moore is an artist, not an academic theorist, so his concept of under-language offers a possible guide for interpretation rather than a formula for composition. As indications go, however, the idea of an under-language in <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> seems enormously valuable. Looking closely at the interplay of visual and verbal, and the logical and figurative structures through which it operates, can reveal a great deal about the work.</p>
<p>Take, for example, the first panel of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. The text box at the top contains an excerpt from the diary of Walter Kovacs, the borderline personality behind the costumed vigilante Rorschach: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.”</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/essays/Figure_1_v1_sm.jpg?itok=fqsb0tdZ" alt="" width="296" height="480" class="image-large" /></p>
<p><span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> panel I.1.1. 1986 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.</p>
<p>The phrase “true face” delivers our first taste of the under-language by way of a characteristic visual-verbal pun. The words appear above a channel of bloody water that flows (appropriately enough) into a gutter, washing past a bloodstained lapel button. The button is an instance of that familiar pop culture flotsam called the <span class="lightEmphasis">happy face</span> or <span class="lightEmphasis">smiley</span>, and it initiates the series of significant faces-human, symbolic, and horological-that forms the main symbolic register of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. This under-language juxtaposition implicitly frames a question: Does the bloody button represent the true face of which Rorschach speaks? Various answers are possible.</p>
<p>Like irony, Moore’s other favorite trope, puns superimpose identity and nonidentity, setting up an array of simultaneous, contradictory readings. The face in this picture is both true and false, or a truth based on a lie. Strictly speaking, the image does not show a true face: first, because it is a minimal representation, an icon that reduces a human face to three simple marks (McCloud 29); and second, because this particular button was the sardonic emblem of Edward Morgan Blake, a costumed thug known as the Comedian, a figure whose true face (or identity, motives, or allegiances) usually stayed hidden. Then again, the moments to which this object graphically connect - Blake’s collapse just before Veidt hurls him to his death, and his anguished appeal to a former enemy a week before the murder - may indeed add up to a moment of truth (I.3.3; II.23.8). Read more figuratively, the bloody button may be a true face after all. Marked with Blake’s blood, the object does echo his actual face, slashed by a scorned woman in Vietnam, the cut approximating the angle of spatter on the button (II.14.6).<cite id="note_4" class="note">In the attack (II.14.6), we see Blake from behind, with a spray of blood running across his face, projecting above the left temple, forming an angle that is similar to the blood on the smiley button (about 11:00 in clock terms). In subsequent panels (II.15.3-6), Blake’s hand is raised to his face at about the same position. Yet the scar from the wound is more ambiguous. In II.23.8, it runs across the lower part of Blake’s face, pointing to about 9:00, while in IX.23.8 it runs from mouth to eye socket, angled toward 10:00. Moral of the story: though <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> seems to invite an obsessive attention to visual detail, it is not after all a clockwork device. As we will see, the fact that Blake’s face carries a scar and thus lacks perfect symmetry matters more than the exact conformation of the scar.</cite> In a larger sense, a bloodstained leftover from some mindless fad, turned into the calling card of a government assassin, finally a token of his violent death, might indeed represent the true face of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s Pax Americana: a brittle, false prosperity built on brutality and lies.</p>
<h2>Clockwork</h2>
<p>The search for a true face, or the face of truth, runs throughout <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. Moore and Gibbons construct a densely interwoven gallery of human faces, often drawn in one-third view, dead on, looking straight at the reader, as if in intimate address - or framed for a mug shot. Nonhuman faces also matter a great deal. As we might expect from something called <span class="lightEmphasis">Watch-men</span>, dials, clock faces, and other timepieces proliferate. Every chapter closes with the story’s own Doomsday Clock, each image placing the hands closer to midnight. Jon Osterman, the atomic scientist accidentally made superman, starts on his path when his father, a jeweler, scatters watch parts into the street, declaring the end of the Newtonian universe after reading about the theory of relativity (IV.3.6-7).</p>
<p>In the fatal event, Osterman is betrayed by a pair of timepieces. In 1959, he enters an experimental chamber to retrieve a wristwatch he has repaired for his fiancee, Janie Slater, becoming trapped by a time lock on the door, thus dooming him to disintegration (IV.8.2). Albert Einstein, or the collateral result of his physics, is still very much to blame. Slater’s wristwatch is smashed by a “fat man,” connecting it by allusion to the image of a blasted watch on the cover of <span class="booktitle">Time</span> magazine in 1985, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing (IV.6.5; IV.24.7).<cite id="note_5" class="note">“Fat Man” was the nickname for the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The Hiroshima device was called “Little Boy.” For what it’s worth, the panel preceding the fat man’s tread (IV.6.4) shows a young boy in tears.</cite></p>
<p>The under-language is strong in this chain of references, and indeed throughout the fourth chapter, “Watchmaker.” Many major themes converge here: symmetry and reciprocation (the tick and tock of clockwork); desire and fatality (Osterman offers to repair Slater’s watch after they first make love); submission and dominance (Osterman’s destruction and transfiguration); and finally, time itself - or rather, a particular critique of time.</p>
<p>The superbeing that Osterman becomes, named Doctor Manhattan by his government handlers, exists outside mortal categories. Somehow his will and consciousness survive the destruction of his original body, enabling him to reassemble a new, heroic body by directly manipulating fundamental particles and forces. The reborn Osterman is apparently indestructible: Veidt immolates him a second time in the final chapter, but he simply reconstitutes on a larger scale (XII.14.4; XII.17.4). Along with death, Doctor Manhattan has also escaped the human experience of time. As he explains to Laurie Juspeczyk, his estranged partner: “Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet” (IX.6.6).</p>
<p>Even without the benefit of Moore’s hints about an under-language, it should be apparent that Doctor Manhattan’s jewel-like conception of time also describes the architecture of <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>. All the examples we have discussed above exhibit this spatial or fractal quality in some degree. While each panel of <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> may not display “the whole design,” most seem to fold back against other moments in the story, making distinctions of time and sequence seem arbitrary. Chapter IV, which lays out the autobiography of Osterman, presents a series of flashes back and forward, punctuated by something like jump cuts. The under-language of comics thus works to simulate Doctor Manhattan’s unique awareness, his post-Newtonian, relativistic being in time.</p>
<p>This convergence of narrative and medium begs an important question: How are we to understand a story operating in jeweled or prismatic time? To recur to Manovich’s comments on comics and the logic of industrialism, what is gained by deconstructing the over-language of film and prose, reaching beyond the two dimensions available to screen and page? This peculiar way of storytelling gives access to a simultaneous, parallelistic conception that would be much harder to express in conventionally sequential media; but radical moves always imply skepticism, if not resistance. Pynchon, whose work reaches in its own way toward spatial narrative (and comics), has given us a useful parable. In <span class="work-title">Gravity’s Rainbow</span> we meet a misallied couple, Leni and Franz Pokler, similar in some ways to Moore’s Juspeczyk and Osterman, though with different fates. Leni is given to mystical thinking, while engineer Franz prefers more linear solutions:</p>
<blockquote><p>He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without mercy, telling her what she was supposed to believe, then denying it. “Tides, radio interference, damned little else. There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here.”</p>
<p>“Not produce,” she tried, “not cause. It all goes together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don’t know…” She didn’t know, all she was trying to do was reach.</p>
<p>But he said: “Try to design anything that way and have it work.” (159)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In many ways, <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> seems the true child of Leni’s mystical understanding, shot through with coincidences, parallels, and what Pynchon calls “Kute Korrespondences,” connections that point to ominous or fatal design. In reading <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> we always seem to be “mapping on to different coordinate systems,” through visual and verbal puns, analogies, or other agencies of association. Yet as the insistent duality of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> reminds us, every Leni has her Franz, an idiot questioner who will ask what the clockwork does when we engage its mainspring - whether, once we have designed a model of jewel time, we can somehow “have it work.” Foolish though it may be, this question deserves consideration, if not a direct answer. To do this, we need to examine more closely some features of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s remarkable construction.</p>
<h2>Who Makes the World?</h2>
<p>Shortly before Doctor Manhattan delivers his jewel theory to Juspeczyk, she asks why, if he is able to foresee everything that will ever happen to him, he is constrained to behave in any particular way. The superman replies that he is still a puppet of the universe, but “a puppet who can see the strings” (IX.5.4). Ever the atomic scientist, Manhattan/Osterman refers to those higher-dimensional structures that cosmologists have postulated as the basis for post-Einsteinian physics. Yet since this phrase invokes another magical pun, we are reminded of puppets and puppeteers, watches and watchmakers, and other more mechanical structures. Reaching further, as <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> always encourages us to do, we might also think of “the strings” as a figure for those threads or skeins of meaning that network the text, and thus of the basic geometry of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> itself. What does it mean to “see the strings” in this sense?</p>
<p>To begin with, this point of view implies the ability to change scale or perspective, the better to appreciate local structures in a larger context. An excellent illustration of this principle comes at the end of Osterman’s interview with Juspeczyk in chapter IX, “The Darkness of Mere Being.” Disillusioned by the breakdown of his marriage and insinuations that he has caused cancer in those close to him, Doctor Manhattan removes himself to Mars, the better to contemplate the difference between a sterile, red planet and a blue one teeming with life (IX.9.1). He raises an elaborate building from the Martian sands, meaning to put humanity on trial in the person of his estranged lover. This fortress of solitude, or palace of justice, is a gigantic, abstract sculpture suggesting a deconstructed clockwork (IV.27.3, IX.4.4). At the climax of their interview, just as Juspeczyk passes the test that redeems the human race, she throws a bottle into the structure (fantastic or not, this is still a domestic incident), shattering it into a shower of fragments.</p>
<p>What follows is perhaps the second most impressive technical maneuver in <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. As Doctor Manhattan walks out of the ruined palace to return with Juspeczyk to Earth, the perspective begins to shift, panel by panel, from a few meters above the scene to a distant point in interstellar space (IX.26.1-IX.28.3). This ambitious crane shot is reminiscent of the Charles and Ray Eames’s <span class="work-title">Powers of Ten</span>, and even more closely, the astronomical pullback in Andrei Tarkovsky’s <span class="work-title">Solaris</span>, where the camera zooms out like a rocket to reveal that an apparently domestic scene actually belongs to an alien world.<cite id="note_6" class="note">At the end of <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>, we see an advertisement for a Tarkovsky film festival, evidently a sign of U.S.-Russian concord.</cite> The sequence is more than just homage, however, as it is shot through with crucial details.</p>
<p>After its tour of the planet, Doctor Manhattan’s clockwork palace has come to rest within a crater in the Argyre Planitia. This formation has a secondary impact ridge and two large boulders or outcroppings-elements that form the ubiquitous happy face. The magical quotient of this visual pun is very high indeed, as it turns out that this curious spot is an <span class="lightEmphasis">actual feature</span> of the planet Mars, a crater called Galle, first photographed by Viking Orbiter 1 in 1976, revisited by the Mars Global Observer in 1999 (Malin Space Science Systems).<cite id="note_7" class="note">I am indebted to Dennette Harrod Jr., a contributor to my <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> commentary site, for bringing this fact to my attention. See <a href="http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/comix/watchmen/mars.htm" title="Dennette's Watchmen Page" class="outbound">Dennette’s <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> Page</a>. The Galle crater is not to be confused with the more debatable structure in the Cydonia region, more or less debunked by the Mars Global Surveyor. See <a href="http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/4_6_face_release/index.html" title="Mars Orbital Camera Views" class="outbound">Mars Orbital Camera Views</a>.</cite> It is easy to imagine Moore and Gibbons’ delight in discovering this piece of areology. If a circle with two dots and a curve is the simplest, iconic representation of a face, and if this icon is in a sense a primitive element of comics art, then the Galle crater is a cosmic comic. The artist is unknown, perhaps nonexistent - and for <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> at least, this uncertainty is very much the point. As Doctor Manhattan muses, watching his Martian palace rise from the sands, “Who makes the world?” (IV.27.3). We might also frame a slightly different question: If a pattern forms on a dead planet, when does it become a face?</p>
<p>Leaving theology and metaphysics aside, we should notice an important difference between astronomical data and artistic rendering. Moore and Gibbons have fiddled the proportions: crater Galle is 215 kilometers across, or about the distance from Washington, DC, to Philadelphia, at which scale we would not be able to resolve both human figures and the boulders that form the eyes (IX.26.5). More significantly, they have added the smashed remains of Doctor Manhattan’s flying palace, which does not correspond to anything in the actual crater. In their depiction, the wreckage lies just southeast of the right-eye boulder, thus echoing with only slight variation the Comedian’s bloodstained button.</p>
<p>The first resonance of this image is local, climactically closing the ninth chapter with a visual power chord. Doctor Manhattan decides to avert a possible nuclear holocaust after Juspeczyk unwittingly reminds him of the miraculous improbability of human life. The crater beautifully symbolizes this primal accident: a highly unlikely arrangement of inert matter into an echo of that other sublime accident (or if you prefer, divine design), the human face. In an odd way, the dead, red world has produced an image of life - or an emoticon, at least.</p>
<p>At the same time, though, the discovery of this image resonates in other ways as well. As an ordinary human, Juspeczyk cannot see the larger pattern of which she is a part, even though she determines at least its final stroke, first by refusing to fly further, causing Doctor Manhattan to land at Galle, and then by smashing the palace where it stands (IX.22.1). Both actions are impulsive and entirely unplanned - “thermodynamic miracles,” to echo Doctor Manhattan’s description of humanity (IX.21.9). As a superman, he is capable of both astronomical views and grand architectural gestures, but there is no indication of either in this moment. When he and Juspeczyk vanish from Mars, they reappear on Earth, so the cosmic crane shot on the chapter’s final pages does not represent their point of view. (It probably prefigures Doctor Manhattan’s departure at the end of the story, but this is mapping to another system, in every sense.) In effect, the perspective of the final sequence belongs only to the reader and the authors. Reading the under-language of comics, we see what the characters do not or cannot; but what exactly do we see?</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/essays/Figure_2_v1_sm.jpg?itok=C40JGeev" alt="" width="465" height="236" class="image-large" /></p>
<p><span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> panel IX.27.1. 1986 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.</p>
<p>Taking the Galle tableau at (unavoidably) face value, the scene would seem to signify completeness or perfection of symmetry. As the characters agonize about the possibility of meaning, they walk through a gigantic design that is both highly significant and entirely accidental. Watching the watchmen, we close the circuit of irony between authors and reader. We also witness an act of inscription: Juspeczyk’s destruction of the palace has quite <span class="lightEmphasis">literally</span> graphic consequences. In terms of its own semiotics or under-language, <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> thus inscribes its primary icon on itself, setting up a resonant, self-referential sign system, a kind of standing wave or feedback loop. This episode of visual noise rings true. Even accident produces pattern, and when humans come on the scene, pattern becomes meaning. Delivering this message, art confirms its function. Beauty is truth, and life goes on. The pendulum of uncertainty, oscillating between extinction and survival, red Mars and blue Earth, ticks back again, duly reciprocal. Even the planet smiles.</p>
<p>This all-too-easy reading, however, neglects at least one crucial detail. To complete the grand design, Juspeczyk must shatter the crystal palace, reducing its elegant architecture of cups, wands, and wheels, with its meticulous fourfold balance, to a jumbled heap of fragments. In creating the larger, unseen pattern, she destroys the one at hand, wrecking its harmonic arrangement. Notably, she must also disrupt the larger symmetry of the original scene: by adding a fifth stroke to the design, the fallen palace defaces the face on Mars. This more complicated reading reminds us that noise or entropy are as important in <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> as integrity of signal. The under-language of this work contains more than puns, ironies, echoes, and other reciprocating structures. It also encompasses flaws, fissures, gaps, gutters, and other limits to design.</p>
<h2>Everything Balances</h2>
<p>We can find the most compelling demonstration of this fact in the remarkable chapter V, “Fearful Symmetry,” structurally speaking the most impressive part of <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>.<cite id="note_8" class="note">My treatment of chapter V owes a great deal to Jessica Furé’s reading, which she developed in a research project undertaken with me in 1999. Her essay <a href="http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/wm/readings/fearSym/comments.htm" title="Why Five" class="outbound">“Why Five?”</a> is available as part of <span class="booktitle">Watching the Detectives</span>.</cite> As the title suggests, the chapter is filled with doubles, mirrorings, echoes, and dichotomies. Its main subject is Rorschach, a masked marauder whose costumed face is an ever-changing inkblot. Like many comic book heroes, Rorschach leads a double life, maintaining a secret identity as Walter Kovacs, a sometime mental patient and self-appointed prophet of doom (I.1.3). In much more than name, Rorschach is deeply linked to <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s symbology. At one point we watch him idly deface a menu in a diner, pouring ketchup on to a page, and then folding it over to create a symmetrical stain (V.11.7-9). As we will see, this reference to patterns on folded pages has more than momentary or local significance.</p>
<p>Chapter V abounds with indications of doubleness. The main narrative begins and ends outside a bar called Rumrunners, whose emblem, a pair of mirrored <span class="lightEmphasis">R</span>s integrated into a stylized skull and crossbones, constitutes a double visual echo (V.1.1). It recalls the traditional flag of piracy, and hence the comic-within-a-comic <span class="booktitle">Tales of the Black Freighter</span>, introduced in chapter III and further developed here. At the same time, the mirrored <span class="booktitle">R</span>s of the bar sign echo Rorschach’s signature (V.3.9). Since Moore and Gibbons never do their doubling by half, we first see this emblem as a reflection in a puddle, taking us deeper into the hall of mirrors.</p>
<p>Both the theme and the structure of chapter V participate in this system of echoes. As he hauls Rorschach away at the end of the episode, a police officer notes that the “terror of the underworld” will be locked up with the men he hunted: “Everything balances,” the detective says (V.28.8). This statement may not be entirely accurate but is certainly salient on many levels-including, for chapter V, the material structure of the text itself. The 220 panels and twenty-eight numbered pages of chapter V form a graphic palindrome, a kind of comic as inkblot. On each side of the chapter’s seven signatures, the division of panels on the left-hand page mirrors the arrangement on the right. Page one mirrors page twenty-eight, page two mirrors page twenty-seven, and so forth.<cite id="note_9" class="note">This scheme implies relationships between the panels of corresponding pages. Jessica Furé and I developed a <a href="http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/wm/readings/fearSym/sp0128.htm" title="juxtaposing browser" class="outbound">browser</a> for juxtaposing paired panels, and notes on some of the more interesting correspondences.</cite> The effect is literally half-concealed. Fourteen pages use a regular, three-by-three grid, and so offer no immediate clue to the scheme. Interspersed throughout the chapter, the other fourteen pages vary the regular grid, revealing their relationships more readily. On page nine, for instance, the basic nine-panel page is cut down to six by stretching panels one, four, and five to double width. Page nine is eight pages from the beginning (1 + 8), so its mirror correspondent is eight pages from the end, page twenty (28 - 8). On that page, the doubled panels are two, three, and six, reversing the geometry of page nine. Of course, the most striking evidence of the palindrome falls at the center.</p>
<p>Any palindrome implies a crossing point or chiasmus where orientation reverses. The center spread of chapter V constitutes this structure, especially the cardinal panels (V.14.2 and V.15.1). <span class="lightEmphasis">Chiasmus</span> comes from the Greek letter <span class="lightEmphasis">chi</span>, which gives us the Roman <span class="lightEmphasis">X</span>. <span class="lightEmphasis">X</span> indeed marks the spot where opposites converge and “everything balances,” ostensibly at least. The <span class="lightEmphasis">X</span> is formed by the golden <span class="lightEmphasis">V</span> from Veidt’s corporate logo and the two clashing bodies, Veidt at the left, and his hapless would-be assassin at the right. Veidt’s leg makes up his side of the <span class="lightEmphasis">X</span> pattern, while the assassin’s upper body provides the opposite. Veidt swings his improvised weapon in an arc traversing the upper three-quarters of the image, while the assassin falls in a complementary arc below. The object, evidently an ashtray in the style of an Egyptian urn, is convex at the left, and concave at the right. In the lower quarter of the image, an upright golden head at the left (a dead king) mirrors the inverted face of the killer at the right (a doomed fool), and both are reflected in the fountain pool below, yet another plane of symmetry.</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/essays/Figure_3_v1_sm.jpg?itok=X5FPjU6O" alt="" width="465" height="364" class="image-large" /></p>
<p><span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> panel V.14-1. 1986 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.</p>
<p>In more than one sense, these panels represent the heart of a hall of mirrors, since what we seem to witness here-Veidt’s miraculous escape from a murder attempt, evidently part of the conspiracy against costumed heroes-is an elaborate falsehood, a piece of brutal theater concocted by Veidt to hide his true purpose. The crossing point consummates a double-cross. It would follow, then, that the apparent perfection of symmetrical design is deeply suspicious, and in fact, there is something wrong with this picture. A duly sensitized reader might notice at least one asymmetry, with two horrified onlookers standing at the left and only one on the right. The right-hand figure is a letter carrier (again, in several senses), and on his bag we can make out the characters “US” and “AIL” - suggesting perhaps that something in this scene reveals what in <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s world might ail us. <cite id="note_10" class="note">Admittedly, another reading is possible: what ails us microscopic analysts may be a strange compulsion to read comic books with a 3 × lens. In our defense, Harrigan wisely points out that Moore seems to encourage, if not require, this sort of paranoiac view. <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> contains a vast number of minute but significant details, and anyone who doubts their intentionality should glance at one of Moore’s scripts, where he often takes several paragraphs to specify a single panel. See, for instance, the excerpted script for chapter I included in the <span class="booktitle">Absolute Watchmen</span>, or <span class="booktitle">From Hell: The Complete Scripts, Book One</span>.</cite> Those who have seen the ending know the culprit is Veidt, but his megalomania might raise concern even for an obediently serial, first-time reader. On the next page we see him apparently find (actually plant) a poison capsule in the mouth of the stunned assassin, and then at the end of all the carnage calmly ask an employee to “call the toy people” and cancel a line of action figures (V.16.9). To Veidt, the genius antivillain, humanity is made up of “toy people” who need his attentions. Like the duped assassin in the central scene, or like Rorschach, framed for Edward Jacobi’s murder at the climax of chapter V, everyone is caught in the elaborate structures of Veidt’s plot.</p>
<p>At a later point in the story, Veidt will tell Dan Dreiberg, the hapless Nite Owl, that he is “not a Republic serial villain” (XI.27.1). He means that he has revealed his masterstroke only after it is complete, and the costumed crusaders actually are, as Pynchon says, “My God … too late” (<span class="booktitle">Gravity’s</span> 751). But another sense of <span class="lightEmphasis">serial</span> also operates here: Leni Pökler’s dyad, “parallel, not series.” Veidt is indeed a nonserial villain. He bases his heroic identity partly on Alexander of Macedon, whose “lateral thinking” defeated the Gordian knot (XI.10.2). He uses a method of planning derived from William S. Burroughs’s cut-up technique and takes as his oracle an array of television screens (visually, of course, an analogue of the comics page, and thus of spatial narrative) (XI.1.1-XI.2.4).</p>
<p>Though Veidt is a meticulous cause-and-effect man and a hell of an engineer, his conspiracy ultimately owes as much to Leni as to Franz. The plot is an elegant, nefarious arrangement of “signs and symptoms.” Nonetheless, it would appear that he does “have it work” - or as Moore and Gibbons quote Shelley: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” (qtd. in XII.28.14). At least on first inspection, the irony of Shelley’s poem, where the boast is inscribed on ruins and emptiness, seems reversed. Veidt is successful, and his works reshape the world. By the final chapter, he has managed to outwit his human adversaries, Dreiberg, Juspeczyk, and the resurgent Rorschach. He tries first to deceive, then to destroy Doctor Manhattan, and though he fails, he does force their contest to a draw. “What’s that in your hand, Veidt,” the reintegrated Doctor Manhattan asks derisively, “another ultimate weapon?” (XII.8.4). The object in question is the remote control for Veidt’s video wall, now showing news accounts of his deadly attack on New York. Evidently his phony alien invasion has forced the United States and the USSR to retreat from the nuclear brink-hence the little gadget does stop the superman in his tracks.</p>
<p>Veidt creates an artifice of meaning that becomes the true face of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>, an image of official happiness stained with blood. The “ultimate weapon” is information or persuasion: an appeal to map the world situation on to new coordinate systems and recognize the necessity of that arrangement. Facing the end of the end of the world, yet apparently still committed to humanity’s survival, Doctor Manhattan must enlist in the deception, even to the point of homicide; so he confronts the implacable Rorschach, who intends to reveal Veidt’s murderous fraud. “Evil must be punished,” Rorschach insists (XII.23.4). Doctor Manhattan levels his omnipotent hand, Rorschach urges, “Do it!”, and the “judge of all the earth” blasts him to bits, leaving one last smear of blood (XII.24.3, XII.24.4-5). <cite id="note_11" class="note">In another email note from Harrigan, he writes, “I can’t resist mentioning issue 17 of Denny O’Neill’s <span class="booktitle">The Question</span> where the Question (on whom the character of Rorschach was based, of course), picks up a copy of <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> and reads it on a flight across the country. He falls asleep and has nightmares about dying in the snow, like Rorschach. Naturally, at the end of the issue he finds himself at the mercy of some killers in the middle of a snowstorm, and flashes back to <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>, before Green Arrow arrives to save him.”</cite></p>
<p>It would appear, then, that everything balances. Americans and Russians stand down from Armageddon. Veidt is left like a happy spider at the center of his new world order. Having silently blessed the union of Juspeczyk and Dreiberg, Doctor Manhattan removes himself to a distant planetary system, evidently planning to create life - this after facing Rorschach, his final adversary, and granting his wish for death. Tick, tock.</p>
<h2>Five to Twelve</h2>
<p>On closer inspection, though, this great clockwork displays a suspicious hitch or wobble. Just as Doctor Manhattan’s will defies disintegration, Rorschach leaves a testament that survives his messy death. Before he and Dreiberg set off to confront Veidt in Antarctica, Rorschach mails his journal to the “only people [he] can trust,” a reactionary, anti-Semitic rag ironically named the <span class="booktitle">New Frontiersman</span> (X.22.5). A few pages later, we see Rorschach’s book arrive, at which point the editor, Hector Godfrey, tells his plodding assistant Seymour to add it to the “crank file,” where it is buried in an “avalanche of drivel” (X.24.4-9). The term <span class="lightEmphasis">avalanche</span> is telling, since such structures tend to collapse, smashing everything in their path, and the metaphor may be apt. At the time he dispatches his journal, Rorschach and Dreiberg have accumulated enough evidence, particularly financial and business records, to raise serious, perhaps fatal questions about Veidt. True, Dreiberg and Juspeczyk, the only living witnesses to Veidt’s confession, have absconded under new identities at the end of the story; but mention in Rorschach’s journal would presumably make them subjects of speculation and maybe even pursuit. In short, Rorschach’s posthumous testimony can at least potentially unweave all Veidt’s machinations.</p>
<p>These possibilities converge in the final panel of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>, which we will consider presently. First, however, we need to explore one more crucial feature of the under-language in chapter V, an essential precondition for that final stroke. We have discussed in some detail the internal structure of the chapter, but something needs to be said as well about the way that structure relates to the larger scheme of the work.</p>
<p>Viewed from outside the chapter (from orbit, as it were), the double-crosser’s cross at the middle of chapter V seems oddly placed. As a matter of fact, the entire chapter may be mislocated, if we assume that a palindromic comic makes a natural pivot or bearing for a structure of bilateral symmetry. The midpoint of a twelve-part epic falls in the gap between the end of the sixth part and the beginning of the seventh. Of course, this makes the graphical chiasmus of chapter V formally impossible, so clearly Moore and Gibbons had to break some rules to accommodate their ingenious design. Other decisions seem possible, though, such as locating the palindromic chapter in the sixth or seventh position, or creating a matched set of mirror chapters in both positions. Why choose the fifth chapter for a tour de force of symmetry?</p>
<p>For the author of <span class="work-title">V for Vendetta</span>, and a keen reader of Pynchon’s <span class="work-title">V.,</span> the temptation to play some variations on the fifth Roman numeral may have been too hard to resist. The development from the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">V</span></em> of <span class="booktitle">Vendetta</span> to Veidt, the Mr. X of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>, does seem resonant. One careful reader points out that chapter V constitutes the midpoint of the ten-chapter sequence where Rorschach compiles his journal, detailing the events leading up to the cataclysm in New York (Furé). This interpretation makes some sense, especially considering the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">V</span></em>-into-<em><span class="lightEmphasis">X</span></em> symbolism, which invites attention to the numbers five and ten. Yet as Jessica Furé points out, the middle of a ten-part series comes between five and six, not midway through five. If we insist on reading with scientific precision (not the only way to read, of course), it seems clear that the strongest image of centrality and symmetry in <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> is out of alignment. The chiastic center spread of chapter V sits at an awkward point in the timeline, throwing the entire structure of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> off balance. To paraphrase Pynchon: <span class="lightEmphasis">My God, we are too early!</span></p>
<p>On the other hand, perhaps the fateful symmetry of chapter V is right where it belongs, in precisely the wrong place. The brilliant artifice of the palindrome chapter does not integrate into a grand design but rather disintegrates, or in the strict sense deconstructs that design, opening up its artifice for critical understanding. Chapter V might be understood as an image of Veidt’s plot, an attempt to create a universal balance that cannot succeed because it is subsumed by a larger principle of chaotic flow. Thus we refute Franz Pokler: it is less important to see how the clockwork operates than to know how it fails.</p>
<h2>See the Strings?</h2>
<p>At the end, then, we have to wonder whether the under-language of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> can truly deliver an image of Doctor Manhattan’s jewel time. Perhaps we are left less with an image than a model, a structure subject to testing or experiment, and perhaps the point of this experiment is to observe that model’s failure. Like Doctor Manhattan’s crystalline judgment seat, smashed into signifying wreckage in the Galle crater, Veidt’s plot also seems poised for collapse in the last panel of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>.</p>
<p>Predictably enough, a work that started with a visual-verbal pun ends on the same note: Godfrey’s exasperated outburst, “I leave it entirely in your hands.” As it is in the beginning, the under-language here is deeply ambiguous. Literally, Godfrey’s statement is true enough. He tells Seymour to choose something from the crank file to fill a hole in the upcoming issue. Since the truly ultimate information weapon is now on top of the stack, Godfrey has placed the fate of Veidt’s illusion, on which humanity entirely depends, in Seymour’s unwashed hands.</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/essays/Figure_4_v1_sm.jpg?itok=tyZ-imZ7" alt="" width="465" height="279" class="image-large" /></p>
<p><span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> panel XII.32.7. 1986 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.</p>
<p>At the same time, though, there is a strain of inversion or irony in this final line of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. Though the sequence implied here is formally incomplete - we never see where Seymour’s hand comes down - the deck is stacked (or the stack is decked out) for revelation. Rorschach’s notebook is rendered in full color and detail, so that we can see the book tape inserted two-thirds through, presumably marking the last journal entry. Other elements of the pile are sketched in, suggesting they are not in focus, and inked in blue to indicate they lie in shade. In the near background, the inevitable stain on Seymour’s smiley-bedecked jersey also points decisively toward the book, or if you read its arrow shape the other way, over Seymour’s shoulder into the unwary world. Finally, if we consider the name of our numinous decider, the public can probably expect to See More than it does at present - perhaps more than is good for it.</p>
<p>Reading the last panel as overdetermined in this way reasserts at least one aspect of reciprocation, if not balance: the swinging pendulum of sequential time. Perhaps what we have here, though, is not so much the ticking of a clock (<span class="lightEmphasis">tick-tock</span>) as of a bomb (<span class="lightEmphasis">tick-tock-BOOM</span>). This reading is inescapably fatalistic, nihilistic, or perhaps in a terrible way, realistic. Veidt’s plot staves off an imminent nuclear war, so dismantling its artificial detente raises the likelihood of renewed conflict and perhaps the end of civilization. Read in this way, <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> is an enormously tragic comic.</p>
<p>Consider its ultimate symbol or icon. The stain on Seymour’s jersey, ketchup now, not blood, concludes and summarizes a series of repetitions, from the blotched button of the first panel through various coy echoes of the stain shape (e.g., XI.1.2, XI.28.12) to the defaced face on Mars. This is, finally, the true face of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s city of heroes: a bright circle of devious contrivance, blotted with blood, trauma, and the emergent catastrophes that beset all complex systems. It is the emblem of a clockwork that slips a gear, a broken symmetry that fails to encompass its world.</p>
<p>Yet as we have seen, most signs and statements in <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> have two or more senses, infused by the essential field of allusion and irony that permeates the work. So the signature image or true face of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> also stands for the miraculous catastrophe by which order, consciousness, and meaning emerge from chaotic flux. Bending the light this way through <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s intricate prism brings a different view of the last panel. If the entire structure of this epic comic is in some way experimental, then we can take the final panel as an ultimate observation. As the second-person address in the last line hints, the subject of this test is the reader, or “you.”</p>
<p>Read as final exam, the last panel poses a deceptively simple question: <span class="lightEmphasis">Can you see the strings?</span> That is, can you understand the under-language of this comic, and of comics generally, sufficiently to recognize the artifices at work here? More crucially, can you also hold those artifices in suspension? Learning from chapter IX about the enlightening effects of scale change, and from chapter V about the relationship of local structures to global, we might remember that every panel belongs to a larger pattern, and that it may not complete that pattern but rather disrupt it. Even though so much in <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>’s final measure points toward apocalyptic unveiling, it does after all fail to conclude the act. <cite id="note_12" class="note">If McCloud is right about visual closure, then the grammar of comics depends on our ability to infer context from fragmentary images of actions, so here we have one final case of Moore and Gibbons running around with their under-language on display. At the same time, there is a literary reference here, to the unfinished business at the end of <span class="work-title">The Crying of Lot 49,</span> which leaves the status of the Tristero system permanently unresolved.</cite> Seymour’s hand has not come down. Strictly speaking, it never does. Looking with educated eyes, we may detect details and arrangements that foreordain an outcome - cosmological strings, puppet strings, or chains of under-language-but we who watch the <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> stand outside them.</p>
<p>Read this way, the iconography of the final panel depends not so much on the ominously illuminated book, the final evocation of the world’s true face, or even Seymour’s fatally outstretched hand. What signifies most is the emptiness of that hand, and the fact that the book of final judgment remains shut. <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> ends with an image of its own medium, a bound volume, <span class="lightEmphasis">seen from outside</span>, arrested at the moment before irrevocable conception, in spite of all strings visibly attached. It thus gives a symbolic signature for a liminal or interstitial relationship to objects of communication, a way of seeing and reading that does not hide the strings.</p>
<h2>In Your Hands</h2>
<p>Interstices are inherently awkward places. Those who haunt the gutters tend to look toward the stars or those places where stars gather. As sequentially time-bound animals, denizens of a postindustrial culture still heavily conditioned by linear processes, we do not take easily to spatial narrative. Seeing the strings comes hard, and sometimes you just want to watch something.</p>
<p>We do not lack for choices. The television series <span class="work-title">Heroes</span> is now well into its second season, weaving tropes and themes of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> into a new context that speaks particularly to these post-traumatic times. The Trade Center site of actual disaster is now flanked symbolically not just by <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span>’s Institute for Extraspatial Studies, but by Kirby Plaza as well, another gathering point of pattern and coincidence, not coincidentally named for the great comics master. Tim Kring has even shown us his own version of the strings, in the three-dimensional model of convergences found in Isaac Mendez’s apartment.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a film version of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> is once again in preproduction, the most recent of several attempts to bring Moore and Gibbons’ work to the screen. Moore is notoriously disdainful of Hollywood, refusing to let his name be used in connection with film versions of his comics. He reputedly told the director Terry Gilliam that the best cinematic treatment of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> would be none at all (<span class="booktitle">Wikipedia</span>). The reasons for this antipathy are best known to the author, though seeing a work with the scope and nuance of <span class="work-title">From Hell</span> turned into megaplex fodder certainly does not help. When you read this, you may be able to judge whether the film version of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> fell closer to genuinely interesting inventions like <span class="work-title">Batman Begins</span> or to vapid star vehicles like <span class="work-title">The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</span>. Then again, history may record yet another failed project, leaving <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> among cinema’s greatest stories never told.</p>
<p>In some ways, that last outcome would be appropriate, however it might diminish the canon of comics films. No sequential medium - not cinema, not print, and certainly not the sort of print that makes up a scholarly essay - can do full justice to the under-language of <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. As indicated, this comic delivers not a working timepiece but something more like a catastrophe simulator, an open-ended experiment that the reader is invited or expected to perform. Understanding <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> in this light makes it seem distinctly <em>avant la lettre</em>, something impossible to describe in traditional terms. More than the relic of an older, spatial way of seeing, it prefigures and perhaps inaugurates the next thing in sign systems.</p>
<p>In this century we are beginning to build on our technologies of recording and inscription new media and new language that operate by systematic simulation. We deal less in simple arrays of signs than in sign systems that do not simply store but actively produce and modify meaning. Thanks to instrumentalities like the Web and Google, this change increasingly affects even the most traditional communications. These innovations demand many changes of mind. To acquire the new language, we need an ability to map across multiple coordinate systems, an awareness of contingent or emergent forms, and a keen appreciation of the limits to any neat, self-enclosing order. We must <span class="lightEmphasis">see the strings</span> in many senses: as patterns of association, multilinear paths, and the under-language of database structures, lines of code, and visual presentations. This is by no means easy work, and the magnitude of the change is so great that we tend to engage it only at the limits of awareness, in odd cases and ostensibly minor forms.</p>
<p>As a masterpiece of its particular, invisible art, <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> bears in a major way on our moment. Its nightmare of bodies beyond imagining may have come true in post-9/11 history, but at the same time, so has at least one analogue of its hyperconnected, deeply intertwingled worldview - as every website devoted to Moore and Gibbons’ work attests. Living as much in the future as on Bizarro World, we pass naturally enough from the pages of a self-deconstructing comic to hypertexts, wikis, and other forms that both reveal the strings and make them ready to hand. If <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> did not literally anticipate Internet culture, it provides a structure, and some crucial lessons in structural inquiry, that may be of great help in understanding its underlying media. In an important sense, we must make our world, and reading <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span> may help us live up to the task.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Benkler, Yochai. <span class="work-title">The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom</span>. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.</p>
<p>Furé, Jessica. “Why Five?” <span class="work-title">Watching the Detectives: An Internet Companion for Readers of Watchmen</span>. University of Baltimore, 4 June 1999. Web. DATE OF ACCESS. <a href="http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/wm/readings/fearsym/comments.htm" title="Link for Citation" class="outbound">http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/wm/readings/fearsym/comments.htm</a></p>
<p>Johnson, Steven. <span class="work-title">Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter</span>. New York: Riverhead, 2005. Print.</p>
<p>Joyce, Michael. “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertext.” <span class="work-title">Academic Computing</span>, November, 1988: 10+.</p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. <span class="work-title">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Print.</p>
<p>McCloud, Scott. <span class="work-title">Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art</span>. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Print.</p>
<p>Moore, Alan. <span class="work-title">Absolute Watchmen</span>. Illus. Dave Gibbons. New York: DC Comics, 2005. Print.</p>
<p>—. <span class="work-title">From Hell: The Complete Scripts, Book One</span>. Illus. Eddie Campbell. Baltimore: Borderlands Press, 1995. Print.</p>
<p>—. <span class="work-title">Watchmen</span>. Illus. Dave Gibbons. New York: DC Comics, 1987. Print.</p>
<p>Moulthrop, Stuart et al. <span class="work-title">Watching the Detectives: An Internet Companion for Readers of Watchmen</span>. University of Baltimore, November 2000. Web. DATE OF ACCESS. <a href="http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/wm/" title="Watching the Detectives" class="outbound">http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/wm/</a></p>
<p>Pynchon, Thomas. <span class="work-title">The Crying of Lot 49</span>. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Print.</p>
<p>—. <span class="work-title">Gravity’s Rainbow</span>. New York: Viking, 1973. Print.</p>
<p>Wiater, Stanley and Stephen R. Bissette. <span class="work-title">Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics</span>. New York: Plume, 1993. Print.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/moore">Moore</a>, <a href="/tags/gibbons">Gibbons</a>, <a href="/tags/watchmen">Watchmen</a>, <a href="/tags/dc-comics">DC Comics</a>, <a href="/tags/graphic-novel">graphic novel</a>, <a href="/tags/cold-war-0">cold war</a>, <a href="/tags/nuclear">Nuclear</a>, <a href="/tags/satire">satire</a>, <a href="/tags/bush">bush</a>, <a href="/tags/9-11">9-11</a>, <a href="/tags/time">time</a>, <a href="/tags/spatial">spatial</a>, <a href="/tags/visual">visual</a>, <a href="/tags/dualism">dualism</a>, <a href="/tags/under-language">under-language</a>, <a href="/tags/irony">irony</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1380 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/mammoth#commentsPast Futures, Future's Pasthttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/oracular
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Rob Swigart</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-08</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">The second in a pair, following <a class="internal" href="../endconstruction/mythic">Satisfying Ambiguity</a>.</p>
<p>One day in 415 BC a messenger arrived from the oracle at Delphi to tell the Athenians that ravens were destroying the statue of Athena. It was the sixth year of the Peace of Nikias, the `cold war’ in the middle of a protracted conflict between Athens and Sparta now called the Peloponnesian War, and the news couldn’t have come at a worse time.</p>
<p>The Athenians were discussing an invasion of Sicily. Some saw a request for help from a minor city on the island as an opportunity. Other cities on the island, they said, would rise up and welcome the Athenians as liberators. Sicily may be far away, but it was a rich land, fat with grain, and once it had joined the Athenian empire Sparta would no longer be a threat. Athens would be invincible. Even mighty Carthage would be vulnerable then.</p>
<p>But there were those ravens pecking at the Palladium. This small statue of Pallas Athena, patron deity of Athens, sat atop a bronze palm tree. Athens had donated it to Delphi to commemorate Athenian participation in the defeat of the Persians at the beginning of the century. For decades it had served as a reminder of Athenian democracy, ingenuity, and bravery. Its destruction would be a very bad sign indeed.</p>
<p>Debate in the Assembly over the expedition to Sicily was heated. The war party hinted darkly that Syracuse must have bribed the oracle to concoct a story that would discourage the invasion. They dismissed the prophesy as pure propaganda.</p>
<p>Others argued that this was not the time to invest so much in such a risky operation when the Spartans were still nearby and powerful. Those ravens meant something, and it wasn’t good.</p>
<p>There were other omens, too: the invasion would take place during the Festival of Adonis, celebrated by a re-enactment of the god’s funeral, a bad time to plan a military campaign. Then a priestess arrived from Clazomenae and it turned out her name meant Peace. Finally, one night in early June, someone desecrated most of the sacred statues of Hermes in the city, causing widespread consternation.</p>
<p>But the war party dismissed all evil omens and the invasion went ahead as planned. Two years later the Athenian navy was lost, forty thousand had been slaughtered in the final massacre at the Assinaros River, and the remaining few thousand perished from cold, hunger, and disease while imprisoned in the quarries outside Syracuse. Nine years later an exhausted Athens surrendered to Sparta and the great empire effectively ceased to exist.</p>
<p>Omens and oracles are technologies designed to reveal, at least in part, what has not yet happened. Like the war party in Athens, we may dismiss omens as superstition, but ever since human beings invented the future they have sought, one way or another, to control it. We have tried propitiation, begging through prayer or sacrifice for divine or supernatural intercession, to make the crops grow, to repel invaders, to prevent disaster, or to help us defeat our enemies. We tried prediction through prophecy, oracles, and today, intelligence organizations. We invest in planning and strategy, ways to reduce or eliminate risk. Yet our efforts persist in being futile more often than effective.</p>
<p>This may be because we do not yet understand what we mean by `future.’ Even a superficial glance at discussions of the subject shows that there have been, and are now, many futures, many views of it, many ways to sense it.</p>
<p>The future is a relatively recent development. For the first two or three million years of our existence as tool-making hominids the future did not exist. Time was grounded in cycles: the days, the months, the seasons. Our ancestors wandered the world in small bands, making and discarding stone implements, hunting when they could, gathering when possible, eating as they moved. They were mobile, navigating a landscape by means of focal points, landmarks like unusual rock shelters, ponds, caves, open spaces, associated in memory with timeless or often-repeated events like gatherings with other bands or rich resources. Habitation was temporary, transparent, opportunistic; a cave, a few branches tossed over a frame, a rock shelter. Theirs was an immediate-return society.</p>
<p>For millennia, people slowly gathered innovations - language, new ways of shaping stone, graphic depictions of elements from the world around them. A cognitive shift happened in the Paleolithic; symbolic thinking emerged with a sense that the world held powers beyond sight, forces that operated independently of people.</p>
<p>Humans evolved alongside their resources, and knew `instinctively’ as it were, where and when they could find game and edible plants. They disposed of their dead casually because death was part of the cycle, embedded in life. They made tools and used them on the spot. With language came origin myths of the beginnings of the people, but those stories were disconnected from the daily and seasonal cycles and relegated to a different, unknowable time.</p>
<p>True, in the Paleolithic time a line began to emerge; its people may have had even a foreshortened sense of the future. A spear, for instance, launched into the air, leaves the hand and follows a trajectory in time as well as space. Time unrolled a bit further with the bow and arrow; making the bow, stringing it, shaping the arrow, drawing back, sighting along its future path, letting go, all required foresight, planning, a sense of cause and effect. Traps too demand a sense of the future, of a delayed return. This future was still limited, though, and its curve quickly disappeared around the bend of the cycle.</p>
<p>Such technologies only hint at what will come around 10,000-12,000 years ago, in many different places (though most visibly in southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe). People discovered the wall, and everything about the world began to change.</p>
<p>A wall is a technology. Connect four and cover them, and you have a house, a permanent, fully enclosed cave, exactly where you want it, shaped by human hands, <span class="lightEmphasis">built</span>, not found. Heat stays in, strangers stay out. Risk appears reduced, comfort increased.</p>
<p>But walls require an investment in labor and time, and in turn create new problems. They retain too much heat in summer. Those inside can’t see what’s happening around the house. They can’t get out, and those outside can’t get in. So walls force remedial technologies, like door and window openings. But these in turn create new problems: the wind blows in, strangers can see. Hence curtains, doors, locks. Building a house demands careful planning to include greater complexity.</p>
<p>Walls may also change perception. If hunter-gatherers saw the world in terms of specific places dispersed around a landscape without apparent end, even if bounded on one side by an ocean, domesticated man began to create limits. The wall of the house is a man-made boundary, a line between the inside and the outside. In turn, the house detached itself from the `wild.’ Wilderness, filled with hidden dangers, arbitrary violence, treasures, and traps, lost resolution and focus and slowly faded into an unknown and frightening place. What was close and familiar became separated from what was farther away and unknown.</p>
<p>Initially we may imagine houses were scattered in this wilderness which men exploited as best they could. There is increasing evidence that settlements came before agriculture, and that for reasons perhaps having to do with increasing symbolic thought, people gathered in increasingly populated centers and stayed there. Gradually, because they stayed in one place, they noticed that plants dropped seeds and grew again in the same place, and at the same time in the next annual cycle. Permanence and boundary walls promoted new modes of observation. Planting seeds and harvesting the crops brought the wilderness into the familiar, making it dependable. The zone of the familiar extended outward from the house, overlapping with others, who had settled nearby.</p>
<p>The line of the house wall put boundaries on the world, creating dualities: inside-outside; public-private; us-them. Settlements put up palisades, and the wall now contained a village.</p>
<p>Yet these were still hunter-gatherers, accustomed to flexible, small bands. If one grew discontented, she could leave and join another band. Rooted populations could no longer afford to do that. They had invested too much in building, had delayed gratification for too long. They were forced to encounter neighbors all their lives. Such familiarity was a breeding-ground for conflict and demanded more complex forms of social control and symbolic manipulation.</p>
<p>Thus the so-called Sedentary Divide changed everything. By driving thought toward the line and away from the cycles of movement and landmark, the focus of attention changed. As villages grew and drew an increasingly broad area into the familiar and known, time had to change as well.</p>
<p>Çatal Höyük was a continuously inhabited Neolithic village on the Konya Plain in Southern Anatolia. It flourished for over a thousand years, from roughly 7400 to 6200 BC, and over that time built up a mound over fifteen meters high and covered twelve hectares, and represents the largest and most densely populated (up to ten thousand inhabitants at its peak) settlement known. It is an agglomeration of dwellings built side by side in the midst of swampy land. The area was fertile and relatively benign, teeming with game and rich in plant life, though winters were fairly harsh.</p>
<p>Çatal has much to tell us about the invention of the future, because its future is known, and there are tantalizing hints of how people may have seen and thought about what had not yet happened.</p>
<p>At the beginning it seems to have been based primarily on hunting and gathering; there is little evidence of agriculture. Yet the people chose to live in small unlit rooms, pressed against their neighbors, apparently in family groupings of five or six such houses. Entry was through the roof. The village, which grew nodally as newcomers added on to the existing structure, presented only blank walls to the outside.</p>
<p>Death took on a new meaning in this area of the world. Archaeologists have uncovered many burials of decapitated men, many plastered skulls, many burials in the floors. Columns separated areas of the walls, which were plastered in different ways, decorated with images of wild animals and human figures. The floors too were divided into sections, with raised platforms. Walls had been replastered many times, in some instances several times a year.</p>
<p>So space is now divided by man in ways that are clearly symbolic and ritualized. Actions repeat. One house contained 60 burials, while the surrounding ones, presumably relatives, contained none. One house became the focus for the family grouping.</p>
<p>Burial implies a past, and a memory of it. When the useful life of the house was over the roof was torn off, the upper walls knocked down, and the rest filled in, covering hearth and oven, walls and paintings and burials. The house became a tomb, and on top they built another house, often with the same layout and structure. Thus the mound grew through time.</p>
<p>What do the wall paintings, the plastered cattle skulls (bucrania), and careful burials tell us? Symbolic thought populated the world with spirits. Shamans in contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures are intermediaries with the spirit world; they bring back guidance or health. They are often helped by animals - carried on the back of a turtle or a wild aurochs (a kind of cattle) into the underworld, for instance, or by migratory bird or vulture into the upper realm. The animals through which a shaman connects are wild. When animals came into the <span class="lightEmphasis">domus</span>, the house, and became familiar - domesticated - the shaman was forced to reach outward to a new set of animal helpers, those who have remained wild. As the world grew more familiar, and so more complex, the shaman gave way to priests who could manipulate symbols in repetitive, `rational’ ways.</p>
<p>The shamanic world is divided into three parts, the upper realm of spirits, the middle world where we live our daily lives, and the darker earth realm, the place of burial and memory. In this way sedentary Neolithic space gets distributed in new ways, bounded by walls. This distribution is man-made, as the familiar is man-made, and the zone around the house is increasingly arranged, first through architecture and then through agriculture, in ways both symbolic and practical.</p>
<p>Yet there is little evidence at Çatal for division of labor in these dark, crowded interiors. That will come later. Each household was built by its own inhabitants, using materials at hand. The materials differed from house to house. Tool making, food preparation, ritual, all seem to have occurred in every home. There is no sign (yet?) of public spaces or open ritual centers. Çatal is essentially one large, densely populated apartment house in the middle of nowhere.</p>
<p>Halfway through its occupation, though, came new elements. Pottery, for instance. Not only pots, but unusual clay balls appear. They were apparently used for cooking: heat one in the fire and then drop it into the pot to boil water. In this way one fire might serve to heat water for several households. One person could tend the cooking for many, freeing others for less practical activities like developing social status.</p>
<p>We can imagine these houses as they were, the uneven levels of their roofs like a rough open landscape. Up here in the realm of sky, cloth or leather lean-tos would protect the entrance/smoke hole from the rain. The complex roof might resemble a temporary Paleolithic camp, just a few scattered half-tents open to the wind and the eyes of others. Smoke would spiral up from the entrances, each spiral representing a family hearth. This would be the ancient landscape brought to a standstill, like a memory of the deep past when men moved over the earth without marking it deeply.</p>
<p>The smoke escaping into the upper realm might also appear up there as if it were exhaled from the subterranean world, revealing the presence of hidden spirits. Underneath these roofs, though, are the real dwellings - private, enclosed, gloomy spaces filled with smoke (many Çatal burials show evidence of carbon in the lungs). Space down here was divided into smaller spaces, levels, areas, each one for a different function: cooking, tool making, sleeping. Off them were back chambers, separated from the main room by walls, for storage, among other things. Small rounded openings offered access. They were not doors, but portholes through which one had to crawl. So the house might be the middle world, and these dark back rooms the underworld, caves.</p>
<p>Public space was above. Only there could one encounter one’s neighbors. Only there could one look down and see how far the mound had grown over this endlessly changing building. One could see, from up there, clear evidence of a linear past, with a beginning at the level of the plain, and a story told over and over in each layer as it was put down on the previous one.</p>
<p>Burial is memory, and space, changing visibly through time, is memory too. Turn around, then, and look the other way, and men began to see there was a future separate from the cycles that had determined life until then. The wheel that was time left a line behind it, straight and flat into the past. Time, spatialized, took a new form, and with it demanded, insisted, coerced men into searching for ways to understand it. Because time no longer repeated, the world had grown unpredictable.</p>
<p>In the later Neolithic, agriculture and the domestication of animals hastened the linearization of time; such activities don’t allow for immediate returns. Breeding sheep inherently means thinking forward (our metaphors for time are spatial), imagining the distant future result of today’s action.</p>
<p>Like the wilderness, the future was unfamiliar and unknown. A few things might repeat with some certainty - sunrises and such - but there were consequences to actions taken today people could not foresee. Often those consequences were bad. All the fires in Çatal needed wood, and as population grew, available wood shrank. Rainfall changed because the trees disappeared. Smoke from the fires ended lives earlier than before. Agriculture could feed more people, but with harder work, and with less nourishment; lives and stature grew shorter.</p>
<p>Çatal represents a transitional state in human cultural evolution, a mostly hunter-gatherer society becomes fixed and sedentary, its members forced to cohabit with others throughout their lives, to confront the tensions and fears that privacy and familiarity both create, to solve new kinds of problems.</p>
<p>The future grew more compelling as an object. Unpredictable events, or unpredicted ones, could kill. If the game disappeared, or drifted farther and farther away, people had to find ways to coordinate hunting trips. What cultivated fields there were were ten or fifteen kilometers away. Tending fields at that distance is not a day job, and would have required extended trips or organized rotations of labor. One would have to know the right season to plant and project into the future the appropriate time to harvest, and then organize a harvest party at the right time.</p>
<p>So time has developed a three-part structure to mirror the organization of the house. The past, buried in the soil beneath the foundations, along with the dead, supports the living present. The future, above, vast, empty but for the small motions of birds, and the vaster movement of weather, brings the unknown along with the seasonal cycles. The origin myth becomes history, visible in the height of the mound, the memories of past generations in the earth beneath their very beds.</p>
<p>We find that the future has a past, and that the past has had futures all along. Although time is not entirely linear, and never will be - after all, cycles persist in agriculture as elsewhere - it became largely so in the Neolithic, and linear time is unpredictable and filled with surprise. So we human beings, unlike all other animals, create technologies to help us understand what will happen.</p>
<p>The caution here is that Palladium in Delphi. The Delphic oracle was the center of Greek religion because it was the place that interpreted, through the Pythia’s words, the thoughts of Apollo, who knew the future. The future was the real turf of religion, the only `place’ in daily life where the unknown, the unexpected, the feared and desired, ruled, and mere mortals needed help. Priests filled other functions, of course, but they all related, one way or another, to the future. Funeral rites were for the dead, but they propitiated the dead, assured their future lives, and gave future to the surviving living. Memory creates the future; tradition is a way of mapping the past into that line ahead, of preserving it.</p>
<p>The oracle’s words were often ambiguous and difficult to interpret. In that sense, not much had changed since the Neolithic. The flight of birds, the entrails of sacrificial animals, the dreams of kings, all might offer clues for interpretation. Of course those clues might be manipulated for political purposes, and political purposes are always, by definition, self-interested and short-sighted. It’s possible Syracuse had bribed the oracle to send those omens to Athens. It’s possible the oracle was susceptible to bribery. But there were people in Athens willing to accept this as an evil omen because they wanted to stop the invasion of Sicily.</p>
<p>We know what happened, we know the future of that moment: the invasion was a disaster, a folly, the product of a fevered dream of conquest and world domination. We know the history, that the omens were right, and if the Athenians had heeded them they could have avoided catastrophe.</p>
<p>Yet we say that omens are based in superstition, in a desire to believe they reveal something of the future. The supplicant with his question, the Pythia speaking in tongues, the priests who explained those riddles, had nothing but intuition, their own understanding of the world, to help them, and human understanding is fallible, partial and incomplete. Today we want a technology more in keeping with our time, a science of the future.</p>
<p>Society has become enormously complex. We can no longer leave our band when we are dissatisfied or conflict blocks our way. Our band is global and consists of billions of people, and everyone everywhere is a neighbor; there is nowhere else to go. The house engendered such divisions, and the wall blocked sight. Envy and fear were inevitable once the wall was in place. What are the neighbors doing inside their houses? Their expressions are ominous; they portend harm. If they are planning to attack me (since they wonder too what I am doing in here), perhaps I had better strike first.</p>
<p>The wall brought many benefits. If it had not, or if the species could have collectively foreseen the results far, far into the future, we might have abandoned it as a bad idea. Their vision was not so good, though. The signs were ambiguous. Today’s comfort trumps tomorrow’s tragedy. The forests are gone from the Konya Plain around Çatal. The Classic Maya in Central America, who had the most sophisticated calendar in the world, and with it could predict the cycles of Venus, the phases of the moon, the coming of the equinox and eclipses of the sun, could not see the consequences of their own collective actions, and so their civilization collapsed and disappeared, taking with it their art, their sculpture and temples and elegant writing. They could not predict because they picked the easy fruit, the external stuff of stars and seasons, and ignored the consequences of their daily lives, the myriad small decisions that led to ecological exhaustion, diminishing marginal returns, deforestation, drought, social unrest, disease, and loss of faith in an expanding future.</p>
<p>The future breathes. It fills with promise, with hope, and then exhales it all and gasps for air. How we think about the future changes with the present, because the future flows directly from now, and the stories we tell about it reflect the social reality in which we live.</p>
<p>The people who built Çatal are gone. Until the late 1950s the village was buried and unknown. When James Mellaart began to dig in 1961, he started unraveling a story. The way he told it there were ritual shrines. People worshipped cattle. Female figurines have convinced some in our age that the people of Çatal worshipped a mother earth goddess, and now new-age goddess worshippers make the journey. They go because they want to know the future. We all do.</p>
<p>Excavations continue, and the story changes with each new spadeful of earth: now we know there were no public places, no ritual shrines. So we learn a future for Çatal, one the priests tried so hard to know, and failed. And so we know the future of Athens, a great empire that decided, in a moment of arrogance and prideful enthusiasm, to invade a distant land. We know that the Athenians, who had the most powerful navy in the world, went to Sicily with an enormous fleet and overwhelming force. We know that two years later there was nothing left.</p>
<p>We know there were omens, signs that warned them against it, and that they ignored them.</p>
<p>Self-interest is a powerful force, and a necessary one. Without it we would never act at all, and we are creatures made to act. But we need a different kind of vision as well. The future, that vaguely defined yet-to-come, remains elusive. History does repeat - sort of. Creating the future without some knowledge of the past is, in the words of historian Daniel Boorstin, “like trying to plant cut flowers.” Our difficulty is knowing when time is moving through a cycle, and when it is going in a straight line, and it is doing both at the same… time.</p>
<p>Memory is a track of the past, obscured by dust and bad weather, and so unreliable. We can only see part of it, the part that matters to us, today. It is, nevertheless, all we have. In recent decades we have seen history in a state of constant revision. The story it tells keeps changing, growing richer and more complex. It has become postcolonial, feminist, posthuman, multicultural, etc. Strange parallels between disparate parts of the world widely separated in time as well have come to light. Echoes of the collapse of Mesopotamia five thousand years ago occur in the more recent failure of the Maya in Central America.</p>
<p>And there was the Athenian invasion of Sicily. A great empire, the most enlightened (by our lights) on earth, makes a decision, collectively, to go to war in a time of peace. They thought their reasons were sound. The risk was high but the potential rewards were great. They were a democracy and they could bring democracy to others not so blessed. We may find echoes today, of course. But the important, over-riding issue is the future. We know now that our actions will have consequences. We know that many of them are unintended. We know that in a society as complex as the global one in which we live the returns are delayed ever more. Memory is long, and the future should be as long, but immediate events always get in the way. Today’s crisis demands our attention, and we don’t have `time’ to think about the consequences to our response to it.</p>
<p>But we must consider our future carefully. A long past generates a long future. While we hunted and gathered, the future could be as short as a day. After all, yesterday passed, as did lifetimes, without change.</p>
<p>When people began to build a mound out of walls, though, the future fell into history. It has been growing longer ever since. Although our technologies of the future are still very imperfect and we can predict it little better than the Athenians, we ignore it at our peril.</p>
<p>Why did ravens suddenly start pecking at the Palladium? It might be wise today to remember that the Athenians chose to ignore the omen to their regret. Mass demonstrations opposing the war in Iraq could have been such an omen. In the time since the war began we might come to see the global protests as a collective intuition that such a decision was unnecessary and reckless, equivalent to the destruction of a statue of Athena, who was, after all, the goddess of wisdom.</p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Braudel, Fernand. <span class="booktitle">Memory and the Mediterranean</span>, tr. Siân Reynolds, Vintage, 2001.</p>
<p>Hodder, Ian and Craig Cessford. “Daily Practice and Social Memory at Çatalhöyük,” <span class="journaltitle">American Antiquity</span>, 69(1), Society for American Archaeology, 2004, pp. 17-40.</p>
<p>Hodder, Ian. “The Anatomy of a Tell: the Spatio-Temporal Organizatoin of the Early `Town’ at Çatalhöyük.” The Elizabeth Grace Shallit Memorial Lecture Series, Provo, Utah, 2004.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Domestication of Europe</span>, Basil Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, 1990, p. 274.</p>
<p><a class="outbound" href="http://www.infoukes.com/history/inventions/">http://www.infoukes.com/history/inventions/</a>, Review of <span class="booktitle">Ancient Inventions</span>, by Peter James and Nick Thorpe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.</p>
<p>Kagan, Donald. <span class="booktitle">The Archidamian War</span>, Cornell University Press, 1991.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Fall of the Athenian Empire</span>, Cornell University Press, 1991.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War</span>, Cornell University Press, 1990.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition</span>, Cornell University Press, 1991.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Peloponnesian War</span>, Viking, 2003,</p>
<p>Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, <span class="booktitle">Metaphors We Live By</span>, University of Chicago Press, 1980.</p>
<p>Lewis-Williams, David, “Constructing a Cosmos, Architecture, Power and Domestication at Çatalhöyük.” <span class="journaltitle">Journal of Social Archaeology</span>, vol. 4(1), Sage Publications, 2004.</p>
<p>Marshak, Alexander, <span class="booktitle">The Roots of Civilization</span>, Moyer Bell, 1991.</p>
<p>Renfrew, Colin and Paul Bahn, <span class="booktitle">Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice</span>, 3d Ed., Thames &amp; Hudson, New York, 2000.</p>
<p>Tainter, Joseph, <span class="booktitle">The Collapse of Complex Societies</span>, Cambridge University Press, 1990.</p>
<p>Thomas, Julian, <span class="booktitle">Time, Culture and Identity</span>, Routledge, 1996.</p>
<p>Thucidydes, <span class="booktitle">The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War</span>, Robert B. Strassler, Victor Davis Hanson (Introduction), Simon and Schuster, 1998.</p>
<p>Wilson, Peter J., <span class="booktitle">The Domestication of the Human Species</span>, Yale University Press, 1988.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/rob-swigart">rob swigart</a>, <a href="/tags/swigart">swigart</a>, <a href="/tags/oracle">oracle</a>, <a href="/tags/delphi">delphi</a>, <a href="/tags/cold-war-0">cold war</a>, <a href="/tags/neolithic">neolithic</a>, <a href="/tags/iraq">iraq</a>, <a href="/tags/sparta">sparta</a>, <a href="/tags/athen">athen</a>, <a href="/tags/athenian">athenian</a>, <a href="/tags/pallas-athena">Pallas Athena</a>, <a href="/tags/democracy">democracy</a>, <a href="/tags/invasion">invasion</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1104 at http://electronicbookreview.comOn Materialities, Meanings, and The Shape of Thingshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/significant
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Lori Emerson</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-11-05</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Walter Benn Michaels’ latest book stands in relation to an ever-increasing number of post-theory or post-critique books. At their most ambitious, these works seek to rehabilitate the left in the wake of the impossibility of political action under postmodernism; failing that, such post-theory books simply try to find a way to make judgments without drawing on norms, universal principles, or, as Jean-François Lyotard famously puts it, meta-narratives. In fact, the most recent addition - Terry Eagleton’s <span class="booktitle">After Theory</span> (2003), a book which supposedly deals a death-blow to the field of cultural studies - is by the very same author who brought us <span class="booktitle">Literary Theory</span>. Although deliciously shallow in its nasty assessment of the new breed of student who, he claims, is obsessively and uncritically interested in sex, the body, and Friends, Eagleton does touch on one of Michaels’ primary preoccupations: that if, according to high theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, we live in a world of pure difference, and if we therefore must make subjectivity, identity, and culture primary, then we are left without a way to account for, on the one hand, class and poverty and, on the other hand, meaning and interpretation. While Michaels’ account is significantly more sophisticated, the main difference between him and Eagleton, of course, is that Michaels has been against theory and so has been writing post-theory since the height of theory in the 1980s.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History</span>, then, combines his defense of intentionality in Against Theory (1985) with his critique of identity in <span class="booktitle">Our America</span> (1997); in other words, Michaels delineates a general cultural movement from questions about the ontology of the text to an insistence on the primacy of the subject (10). The argument, briefly stated, is that the simultaneous commitment to materiality and identitarianism is both inconsistent and problematic. As he states in a 2002 interview that appeared in <span class="booktitle">The Minnesota Review</span>, such a commitment is real and is bad - strikingly real and bad in that, following Michaels’ way of thinking, if you hold, say, Susan Howe’s views on the importance of the physicality of the text, you must hold that the subject, the identity of the subject, is crucial for registering the physical aspects of the text; therefore, by this logic, you must also hold George Bush’s views on terrorism as a war not of (political) beliefs but of identities, and since terrorists follow what’s being called a perverted form of Islam, theirs is an identity we do not even have to acknowledge. It’s precisely Michaels’ ability to put forth such well-oiled, even seductive, inferential arguments that makes his book fascinating, intellectually and personally challenging, yet also slyly problematic. But before I can speak to the difficulties I have with <span class="booktitle">The Shape of the Signifier</span>, some recounting of its key assertions is necessary.</p>
<p>Recalling the 1967 publication of Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood which marked for many the end of modernism, Michaels frames this year as an end-point after which it became essential to pose the question of what kinds of subjects are entailed by what kinds of objects (13). And, using Howe’s work on Thomas Shepard and Emily Dickinson followed by Paul de Man’s thinking in <span class="booktitle">Aesthetic Ideology</span> as a template, Michaels outlines what in particular is at stake for subjects and texts which are based on a concern with the materiality of the signifier. One of Michaels’ critical innovations is to demonstrate that the prevailing concern with materiality, while commonly associated with visual, concrete and language poetry, is also exemplified in postmodernist writing ranging from science fiction by Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson, fiction by Richard Powers and Kathy Acker, to Conceptual art by Robert Smithson.</p>
<p>But Michaels’ reading of Howe en route to his reading of de Man is, I think, particularly revealing of the shape of his argument in <span class="booktitle">The Shape of the Signifier</span>. He begins his book by turning to Howe’s <span class="booktitle">The Birth-Mark</span> (1993) and her concern with editorial control and authorial intention vis-à-vis the often overlooked physical aspects of the text: the eighty-six blank pages in the manuscript of Shepard’s <i>Autobiography</i> and the smallest physical details of the page (142) in Dickinson’s fascicles. For Howe the problem is, first and foremost, the imposition of editorial control that limits both authorial intention and meaning; but the problem is also that of discerning the accidental from the intentional as well as - even more radically - how to preserve the text when an editor cannot possibly discern the accidental, the purely random [c]ancelations, variants, insertions, erasures, marginal notes, stray marks and blanks, (9) from the intentional. In other words, a lurking skepticism (or the fact that we may never know whether Shepard ‘meant’ for there to be eighty-six blank pages separating the two texts) as well as a dedication to the belief that poetry is a physical act (Interview 157) keeps Howe astutely between a defense of Shepard and Dickinson’s intentions and a defense of what may be purely random, purely meaningless stray marks; it also results in her assertion that the only acceptable edited version of a writer’s work is a facsimile.</p>
<p>Although Michaels is clearly a fan of Howe’s work, the same dedication to text and author that drives Howe also drives him to point out that once a text such as Shepard’s or Dickinson’s becomes a material object that must be preserved and once all of its physical features are equally important, the work not only ceases to be a text that can be edited but it also ceases to be a text. Moreover, once the text ceases to be a text, the author’s intentions become beside-the-point:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Indeed, despite the fact that our interest in the text’s materiality was provoked first by an interest in Dickinson’s intention, we can no longer have any principled interest in Dickinson at all … Thus the most radical form of Howe’s commitment to Dickinson produces a certain indifference to Dickinson - for the things that Dickinson didn’t care about (say, the kind of ink) must matter just as much as the things she did care about (say, the shapes of the letters). (Michaels <span class="booktitle">The Shape)</span></p>
<p>Although Michaels never directly says as much, clearly, taken to its logical conclusion, a strict adherence to materiality simply does not reflect the way we actually think about texts and readers (and he doesn’t directly state his argument since, on the one hand, he assumes that readers are familiar with his earlier defense of intentionality and argument against identitarianism and since, on the other, the force of his argument comes from unpacking the deeper implications of not appealing to authorial intention in favor of the reader’s subjective experience [call it ‘reading’] of the text). For what careful readers of Dickinson, for example, would say they are not reading a text? What readers would claim that they do not think there is such a thing as a text? Further, given such a strict materialist stance, there is the issue of meaning - for if a defense of the purely random mark for the sake of treating the text as an object is an effacement of intentionality, it is also a turn away from meaning (at least as Michaels understands it) for the sake of what Paul de Man calls the text’s sensory appearance. But again, we need to ask: what reader would say that there is no meaning in the lines My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - outside of the appearance of the lines in the poem-as-object? Another way of putting what concerns Michaels here might be that if every single feature of a text matters, then no features matter because to matter (or mean) there has to be defining criteria for what matters and what does not matter; without such criteria, we are left with a potentially endless collection of readers’ reports on their experience of the so-called text and on what meanings they derived from this experience. And, to complicate matters (and meanings) even further, Michaels also points out that the text as object is constituted not only by all of its physical features (a kind of objective, scientific enumeration of its attributes) but also by everything that can be seen by the reader (6). So we’re left with a text as an object that generates effects rather than meanings (a text that ‘does’) and a reader who does not interpret so much as experience the text.</p>
<p>Before I elaborate on what kinds of subjects are entailed by such an account of textual objects, I must first point out that de Man’s much more single-minded, much less elastic than Howe’s, allegiance to materiality is the catalyst for Michaels’ polemic. As he puts it:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">De Man’s insistence on what he calls a material vision thus produces - inevitably, which is to say, necessarily - a replacement of the idea of the text’s meaning (and of the project of interpreting that meaning) with the idea of the reader’s experience and with a certain indifference to or, more radically, repudiation of meaning and interpretation both. (6)</p>
<p>However, Michaels may also be guilty of using Howe as a straw man. That is, no matter how satisfying Michaels’ logic or the tightness of his argument (taken solely on its own terms), and whatever the stakes for literary theory in the attack on de Man, crucial nuances are overlooked in Howe’s work. The problem here is not just that he ends up inaccurately representing Howe; rather, the overlooked nuances may be just what are needed to call into question the larger argument that Michaels wants to put forward.</p>
<p>For example, when he argues that the preservation of Shepard’s or Dickinson’s texts as a way to protect authorial intention actually obviates intention for the sake of the text as object, he neglects the fact that Howe’s attempt (along with attempts by any number of critics such as Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann) to preserve the object is also an attempt to keep alive the author’s intentions; that is, such critical accounts draw attention to the impossibility of ever closing a text off to a single interpretation which also means that the text is what the author intended as well as what the reader reads. Krzysztof Ziarek succinctly puts it as follows:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Howe’s relentless problematization of the effects of the standardization and uniformization of a Melville or a Dickinson text draws attention to the practices of effacing the intrinsic unreadability and open-endedness of these texts, of their plural textualities, for the sake of producing an underlying version of experience as closed and readable. These practices transform experience from an open field of possibilities into a uniform, regulated pattern, into a univocal text which effaces contradictions and conflicts, or singularities, to paraphrase Howe. (275)</p>
<p>What’s at stake here is a fundamental difference in Michaels’ and Howe’s attitude toward what constitutes a text, a reader, the act of reading and interpreting texts, not to mention meaning. Howe understands a text as that which must be read as an artifact of the author’s act of writing and as that which bears meaning on countless different levels (from the paper it was written on, the way in which it was written in addition to the many vectors of meaning carried by each word, each combination of words); further, meaning here is also inevitably created as much by the author as by the text itself and the reader. Moreover, given this multi-layered complexity to texts, for Howe there’s no reason to believe that a text can’t be an object; Charles Peirce’s logical graphs, for instance, are certainly object-like but there’s no doubt that they can be read and interpreted. Michaels, by contrast, seems to want a text, a reader, and a model of reading or interpreting texts that’s considerably more conservative: first of all, from his point of view a text simply is understood to consist in certain crucial features (e.g., [and minimally] certain words in a certain order), and any object that reproduces those features … will reproduce the text (3); likewise a reader is understood to read texts for meaning which in turn simply is understood to be identical with what the author intended - a position that, as far as I can tell, Michaels first outlined in Against Theory and which he continues to hold in <span class="booktitle">The Shape of the Signifier</span>.</p>
<p>Thus, Michaels’ model of texts, readers and meaning is not compatible with Howe’s, and so his model may also not be compatible with the wide range of writers he critiques throughout this latest book - among them Robert Smithson, whom Howe (not coincidentally) has had a long-standing interest in. However, aside from the neatness of his reasoning, what still makes Michaels’ critique of a de Manian material vision powerful is that it can be used to account for certain trends in literature and the arts that are not touched on in <span class="booktitle">The Shape of the Signifier</span>. For instance, given what I outline above, where Michaels might critique language poets such as Charles Bernstein for his move away from a strict understanding of the function of texts, readers, and reading (see, for example, Michaels’ response to Marjorie Perloff in <span class="booktitle">Modernism/Modernity</span> 3:3), his argument can be used to critique standard accounts of language poetry that turn language poems into purely non-referential, purely meaningless works which can simply be accounted for by appealing to the reader’s perceptions and experiences. Again, not only does this strictly materialist account not reflect the way we actually think about texts, but it also ignores important early statements of poetics (or statements of intention) in <span class="booktitle">The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book</span> by poets such as Bernstein in which he claims that his work comes not out the death of the referent or of referentiality, meaning, or intentionality in general, but out of the recharged use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has … of releasing the energy inherent in the referential dimension of language (115).</p>
<p>Further, another problematic version of such a strictly material vision is perhaps even more epitomized by the current abundance of digital poems such as Brian Kim Stefans’ <span class="booktitle">The Dreamlife of Letters</span> or Maria Mencia’s <span class="booktitle">Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs</span> that are, for all their aesthetic appeal, cinematic projections of words and letters doing or merely producing effects. The point is not that these works ignore intention or that they’re engaged with the letter, the word, as a material, manipulable object - rather the point is that they are in fact rife with intention, turning the reader into a passive viewer who has nothing to interpret and can only register the evolving shapes of the letters, thereby closing off the possibility of a text/reader along the lines of either Howe or Michaels. As such, Michaels’ critique of Judith Butler’s theory of resignification (in which to communicate means to risk having the other assign a different meaning to one’s utterance and which Michaels also identifies with the materialist stance) could just as well be a critique of certain accounts of language poetry or of this strain of what I’m calling cinematic digital poems; as he writes, … the ‘force of the performative,’ precisely because it goes ‘beyond all question of truth or meaning,’ will be to replace the understanding appropriate to the sign with the effect appropriate to the mark, to imagine a world in which what the text means will be entirely subsumed by what it does (66).</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>To clarify Michaels’ argument thus far, the turn toward ontologizing texts is a concomitant turn toward the subject since, given that a text’s meaning is now determined by what it does, the reader’s responsibility is to register the effects of the text; and, crucially, since each reader will see or experience the text differently, we are not only left without meaning (or, again, ‘meaning’ as Michaels understands it to mean) but we’re also left with a limitless multiplicity of experiential accounts which cannot be argued with and instead must simply be accepted as differing. The problems with such a way of thinking, he argues, are many: first, we are left with texts that are not texts, that cannot be interpreted, and that have no meaning (when, in fact, few would claim that there is no such thing as a misinterpretation); secondly, while it cannot be denied that texts do have effects, there’s no reason to assume that the text’s effects entirely replace meaning and neither is there any reason to assume that intentional effect entirely replaces intention (127); and finally, once the interpretation of texts is no longer about determining the correct interpretation and instead becomes one of registering the text’s effects, we no longer have any reason to disagree - how can anyone disagree with an experiential account? As Michaels puts it, … the difference between what you see and what I see is just the difference between where you’re standing and where I’m standing - literally, a difference in subject positions (10). In short, the commitment to the materiality of the signifier necessarily means a commitment to the primacy of the subject, the primacy of identity. And so we’ve arrived at the second end to accompany the end of modernism: the end of history.</p>
<p>Working from Francis Fukuyama’s <span class="booktitle">The End of History and the Last Man</span> (1992), Michaels argues that the end of history - marked, according to Fukuyama, by the end of the Cold War - not only means the end of ideological conflict between liberal capitalism and socialism, but it means the end of ideological dispute as such; in other words, the supposed triumph of the West (which has become a global triumph) ended dispute over how society should be organized and so also ended dispute over beliefs (the only driving force behind differing ideologies). So while the Cold War made beliefs essential, thereby also making disagreement possible, the end of the Cold War instead made identity essential, thereby making disagreement impossible. The issue is complex and multi-layered in a way that cannot adequately be expanded on in this review; but the impossibility of disagreement can partly be explained by the following from Michaels:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The differences between (and within) bodies may here be understood as underwriting the insistence on all the nonideological differences. It is, in other words, those differences that have nothing to do with differences in belief - racial difference, sexual difference, linguistic difference, even (and, in a certain sense, especially) cultural difference - that emerge as foundational … people with different bodies don’t thereby have different beliefs. And even people with different beliefs can be understood as not disagreeing with each other as long as their beliefs are understood to constitute a culture rather than an ideology …. Culture, in other words, has become a primary technology for disarticulating difference from disagreement. (16)</p>
<p>One’s culture, like one’s identity, is now seen as something one has - like the language that one speaks, it’s neither right nor wrong but rather just what one is or just the unique subject position one holds. Given the overwhelming dominance of culture as a defining feature of present-day America, it becomes clear that what disturbs Michaels about this post-Cold War transformation is not that people no longer disagree, but rather that this dominant axis of thought makes it impossible for one to say that one’s actions (either as an individual, a culture, or a country) are either right or wrong, defensible or indefensible - they simply are part of one’s identity. And so, to begin the slow return to the beginning of this essay, since economic inequality is tied to class and since class-struggle must be over if communism is over, then poverty becomes an identity that one has, an identity that ought to be respected and that need not be overcome.</p>
<p>Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s <span class="booktitle">Empire</span> is particularly the object of Michaels’ analysis as he argues they treat poverty as if it were an identity, or, more precisely, as if it were identity itself (180) - thereby ontologizing poverty (in the same way that Howe or de Man supposedly ontologize texts) as if it is an identity that ought to be acknowledged and respected rather than fought against or eradicated. However, for Michaels class cannot be replaced with identity - the former can be overcome whereas the latter cannot. (I should also point out that Michaels does demonstrates the complexity of the matter by acknowledging that the transformation of the poor into an identity is a way of reclaim[ing] the poor for the left such that once we turn poverty into a structure of identification … we can begin to think that our problem is that we’re all insufficiently ‘poor’ [181]). But while I sympathize with his assertion that poverty is hardly something that ought to be respected as if it were a mere difference between people, Michaels may again be guilty of overlooking certain nuances to the issue in favor of an all too neat argument that ties together the different strains of thought comprising his career as a thinker. For instance, on a mundane level, it certainly seems to be the case that Buffalo, where I’m presently writing this essay, is the home of a significant working-class identity that is not necessarily defined by income; the moment any one of my Buffalo-bred undergraduate students speaks up in class I’m immediately aware of how much more than simply money informs their thinking. On a less mundane level, Hardt and Negri are hardly simply proposing to ontologize poverty in the way that de Man seeks to ontologize texts - they are proposing, at the very least, that there is a new proletariat (distinctly different from the industrial working class who were defined by their waged labor and who therefore were defined simply by how much money they had) which participates in processes of ontological constitution that unfold through the collective movements of cooperation (402). In other words, a processual unfolding of ontological constitution is not identical to ontologizing - the former does not imply that culture is something one has in the way that one has a language, but rather that culture is something that one is continually, actively in the process of creating. Moreover, it also seems that Hardt and Negri are not speaking of identity at all since the scope of the new proletariat, or those whose labor produces and reproduces social life and so are not contained by the working day, is so far-reaching as to cease to be an identifiable identity at all.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Shape of the Signifier</span>, then, pulls together the major strains of Michaels’ thinking over the last twenty years or so to argue that the aesthetic commitment to the physicality of the text and to the subject position, as at least partly exemplified by Susan Howe’s concern with Shepard’s eighty-six blank manuscript pages, runs parallel to the political commitment to embrace cultural identity. While, to my mind, the project problematically comes to resemble a theory of everything, there’s no doubt Michaels has written a deeply provocative and deeply troubling book for artists and thinkers alike.</p>
<h3>Acknowledgments</h3>
<p>Many thanks to Benjamin Robertson, Joseph Tabbi, and the members of the Buffalo poetics listserv for their helpful suggestions.</p>
<h3>Works Cited</h3>
<p>Bernstein, Charles. Semblance. <span class="booktitle">The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book</span>. Eds. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.</p>
<p>Eagleton, Terry. <span class="booktitle">After Theory</span>. New York: Basic Books, 2003.</p>
<p>Fukuyama, Francis. <span class="booktitle">The End of History and the Last Man</span>. New York: Free Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. <span class="booktitle">Empire</span>. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2000.</p>
<p>Howe, Susan. <span class="booktitle">The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History</span>. Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 1993.</p>
<p>—. Talisman Interview, with Edward Foster. <span class="booktitle">The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History</span>. Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 1993. 155-181.</p>
<p>Mencia, Maria. <span class="booktitle">Birds Singing Other Birds Songs</span>. <a href="javascript:viewExternalSite('http://www.m.mencia.freeuk.com/');">http://www.m.mencia.freeuk.com/</a></p>
<p>Michaels, Walter Benn. <span class="booktitle">Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism</span>. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.</p>
<p>—. Response. <span class="booktitle">Modernism/Modernity</span> 3:3 (September 1996): 121-126.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History</span>. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2004.</p>
<p>—. with Knapp, Stephen. Against Theory. <span class="booktitle">Critical Inquiry</span> 8:4 (Summer 1982): 723-743.</p>
<p>—. with Williams, Jeffrey J. Against Identity: An Interview with Walter Benn Michaels. <span class="booktitle">The Minnesota Review</span> 55-57 (2002).</p>
<p>Stefans, Brian Kim. <span class="booktitle">The Dreamlife of Letters</span>. <a href="javascript:viewExternalSite('http://www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream/index.html');">http://www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream/index.html</a></p>
<p>Ziarek, Krzysztof. <span class="booktitle">The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event</span>. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/walter-benn-michaels">Walter Benn Michaels</a>, <a href="/tags/theory">theory</a>, <a href="/tags/deconstruct">deconstruct</a>, <a href="/tags/ziarek">Ziarek</a>, <a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a>, <a href="/tags/mencia">Mencia</a>, <a href="/tags/howe">howe</a>, <a href="/tags/de-man">de man</a>, <a href="/tags/eagleton">eagleton</a>, <a href="/tags/bernstein">bernstein</a>, <a href="/tags/poet">poet</a>, <a href="/tags/cinematic">cinematic</a>, <a href="/tags/digital">digital</a>, <a href="/tags/hardt">hardt</a>, <a href="/tags/negri">negri</a>, <a href="/tags/culture">culture</a>, <a href="/tags/identity">identity</a>, <a href="/tags/cold-war-0">cold war</a>, <a href="/tags/fukuyama">Fukuyama</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator956 at http://electronicbookreview.comDelete the Border!http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/hacktivist
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Fran Ilich</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-07-31</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>There was a time when I perceived the USA as a kind of backyard to my city, Tijuana, a place where my happy family could go every weekend. We went to the US to enjoy ourselves, to buy our favorite groceries, get the clothes we liked and acquire the toys that drove our imagination. There was no question for me that the USA was the place to be, even though the Mexican government was bombarding all Mexicans with nationalist pride, to guard the borders against the USA, against imperialist invasion and <span class="foreignWord">malinchismo</span>. In Tijuana, television was an English-language affair. There was no way that any young person with self-respect would give up American TV - especially when the “Mexican” broadcast alternative was basically reruns of old American shows (with bad Spanish language dubbing). This I suppose was during the last moments of the Cold War.</p>
<p>Growing up in Baja California, was for me often more than I could manage. Just think for a moment what it is to grow up two and a half hours away from Disneyland, just five minutes from sunny California, but also to live the experience of the third world. Even by airplane, Mexico City was much further away. Between McDonald’s on the one hand and pyramids on the other, Tijuana was neither one thing nor the other, first world or third, modernity or historical landscape. And to further complicate matters, my mom had been a flower child of the hippy sixties, and my father a young intellectual who consumed international literature, including Soviet books. So their experiment (that is me) ended up reading everything, being exposed to lots of things. Trapped in Tijuana, every small thing I ever did nevertheless would end up compared to what a kid in Prague, Paris, or Beijing was supposed to do.</p>
<h2>So then….</h2>
<p>So then we started getting old, slowly, living this phase called puberty, adolescence, and noticing that the houses on the beaches of Mexico belonged to US citizens, that the people from the Mexican government were as corrupt as they could be: the country was itself a business operation. We began to notice that what we thought were language differences stemmed from something much deeper than that. We might have called it racism, but maybe that isn’t the word for people who are simply not interested in Mexicans, not unless they are cleaning their houses really cheap, doing the dirty work, or being that guy at the bar who gets them the next margarita.</p>
<p>As an exercise we can ask ourselves how many tourists from the USA want to make Mexican friends in Mexico? How many want to hang out in the places where Mexicans are?</p>
<p>Cities in the north of Mexico like Tijuana are new. We are living cultural processes yet to be defined. Despite the fantasy of free flow, the border instead of being in a process of dissolution is still in a process of continuous (re)construction, both physically and psychically. For instance, in the 80s there was no material wall separating the national spaces. Now there is one. In one sense, this dividedness accurately represents the human relationship of the two countries and their societies. But many observe that all of the barriers simply describe the nature of the two countries’ connectedness. The walls and guards can be viewed as participating in the active connection of the two countries - serving as part of a clever selection process ensuring that the USA receives only the “best” workers: those who are ready to pass lots of obstacles, abandon their past life, and be ready to settle in an environment where they’ll be treated as the illegal Other.</p>
<p>Every time we were at the border gate to the USA the agents would ask questions: what are you bringing from México? Food? Bombs? Drugs? So we discovered that even our food was bad, that it was contaminated with bacteria, that our bodies played host to viruses capable of re-creating diseases long forgotten.</p>
<p>And they would ask my family why my name was Ilich.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">But that is a Russian name. Why?</span></p>
<p>And mom would smile, saying it was the name of that fabulous composer named Tchaikovsky. And that was it. That always got us waved through. And so I was free to shop in the land of the free. The agent would say bye as he was fiddling with his computer, making the next alien nervous while typing in the plates of his car. Because that is also inevitable for us: Mexicans coming into the USA are aliens, not tourists, not travelers: aliens. What a nice warm word to receive one’s neighbors!</p>
<p>This ritual happened every time. Dad would say “look normal” every time when getting near the border. Likewise the agents would usually try to make us feel nervous. Why? Of course there were many nice agents. But the agents weren’t the end of it. Sometimes at shops or parks I would notice we weren’t treated the same by employees, or even acknowledged in a nice fashion by many people. So I could not help but know something was quite strange with us and this border even though, for me, a middle class Tijuanese and son of two Mexican teachers, I really wanted to see San Diego (even all of the USA) as just another part of my city: the nice part, the place to be, the future. An agent asking for a passport and a visa to come to this other nice part of the city was in its own way perfectly normal.</p>
<p>Through the years there were many funny border crossing stories, and I couldn’t possibly fit them all here. Once, when I was 18 years old, I was taken to secondary inspection because of carrying a Timothy Leary book and also because I was travelling with an American citizen. This seemed amazing to me, so the next day I tried to cross again, but this time with a William S. Burroughs book. That time I was also taken to secondary inspection.</p>
<p>Prior to this, during the 80s my dad became a <span class="foreignWord">rhodino</span>, but not us. That was the beginning of an extra border in our lives. His green card made him virtually an American citizen. So why did the rest of the family remain Mexican? That made a lot of the agents suspicious. I especially remember one time in the 90s, at sixteen or seventeen years old, when I was arrested because of skating in a no skating zone, the police handcuffed me and held me against the street in the usual fashion of the `Cops’ TV show, and then my dad saying afterward I shouldn’t mention he was practically an American citizen or else he might lose his virtual nationality.</p>
<p>Those were the days when there where still many Mexicans and Centroamericans trying to get into the USA via Tijuana, so you could see crowds and lines of them, all the way down the international highway, people camping and so on. I remember it was quite dangerous to walk in those places, not only because many of the people aspiring to cross were in complete poverty and desperation, but also because the people who took them into the USA were criminals: robbers, smugglers, drug dealers. Back then there was a very Mexican tradition, “smash the traitors.” Because how could a Mexican perceive another Mexican that left his country for the USA, if not as a traitor? So this tradition involved hurting those who crossed. I remember one time after class, in high school, riding in a car with my friends, everybody drinking and smoking, and then when we got to the border area my friends threw bottles at the border-crossers. At least one of the bottles found a target. It made me wonder why did some Mexicans think they were better than others just because they already enjoyed a middle class life in our chaotic system, while others more unfortunate had to leave for another country just to be able to eat. Back then there was a Mexican answer to this, and it had to do with the word dignity, although I’m not sure that living in one’s “own” country under such conditions involves large quantities of dignity. Such a nice word.</p>
<h2>Kinds of Borderhacking</h2>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Graffiti artists</span>: There was a graffiti krew in the 90s, they called themselves HEM, that is <span class="foreignWord">Hecho En México</span> (Made In México), and they were basically a krew of teenagers from both countries. Kids who studied in the USA and lived in México, or Americans of Mexican origin living in the US. They committed an amazing action against the border, one of those that impacted me the most, and was perhaps the most naive and authentic. One morning the thousands of cars in line to cross into the USA could see just above the gate a graffiti that read: <span class="foreignWord">“sueño-kenos-HEM”</span>. This was just the signature of the individual taggers plus the name of their krew in Krylon spray painting. You have to understand: this wasn’t just marking the border wall; this was placing a tag on the US customs building itself. Yet not one of the local performance artists came out in support when the government put these teenagers in jail, or when right-wing groups targeted the tagging kids for assault and beatings. The left community was silent and even the democratic party was against taggers. They didn’t like what this new generation was doing (much in the same way that we didn’t like what the older generation was doing).</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Human organ and baby smugglers</span>: The legends say many older Americans buy the organs of healthy Mexicans who are worth more to their families dead than alive. Mexican infants are offered for sale as instant family members.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Kid bunnies</span>: these are children, less than 13 years old, and sometimes even 6 or 7, whose job is to play with border patrol agents in order to divert attention from families who would immediately benefit from this confusion in order to start the race of their lives. They would sprint across the border entry, through freeway 5 (just where it starts), against traffic until they found cover in fields, a house, anywhere. Complete families would start racing with a backpack filled with their lives and dreams; the luggage of a please please please make this a <span class="foreignWord">bon voyage</span>…. and then families would split up against the rock of circumstance: those who got caught, those who couldn’t run fast enough; those who were run over by a car. Do you remember those street signs of Mexican families running? I’ve seen them so many times, as much as they can be seen. And still just to think of it makes me want to cry. It’s a sure bet. It never fails, like watching “Cinema Paradiso” yet another time.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Narcojuniors</span>: kids spending their time on the drug business, smuggling illegal substances into the USA via borrowed cars, which sometimes they get to keep after a successful mission. In many border cities, this is one of the only ways in which young people can make a “fine” living.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Polleros</span>: organized groups in charge of the exportation of a Mexican cheap labor force into the USA. Their activity is treated as if highly illegal, although it is obvious that these persons are structurally permanent within the system. A few years ago their primary methods consisted of crossing people through the desert, but they have evolved in many ways, particularly the use of technology to make false ID papers.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Students</span>: kids who decide to spend extra time commuting in order to get a U.S. education. One of their continual problems is language, both ways if they have to come back to receive Mexican education.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Workers</span>: the original reason for the border and for the continuous human crossing of it.</p>
<h2>Kein mensch ist illegal</h2>
<p>In 1997, during a European event called “Documenta X”, an idea for a Germany/Poland border festival was put forward. The festival was to be in the form of a camp where activists and artists would express their outrage towards the treatment of illegal immigrants at the border. The camp became a reality in 1998, under the name <span class="foreignWord">kein mensch ist illegal</span> (no one is illegal). In spite of several attempts by the police to cancel and sabotage the event, cyberculture personalities, artists, musicians, activists, and human rights supporters successfully organized marches, talks, concerts, and workshops. Through the years this effort has grown, and now the chain of border camps has grown to the point where there are now actions like Deportation Class, a hacktivist and physical strike that happens in airports like Frankfurt International.</p>
<h2>The birth of the borderhack</h2>
<p>Inspired by international actions like <span class="foreignWord">Kein mensch ist illegal</span>, Reclaim the Streets, and the teknoval raves of infamous sound systems like Spiral Tribe or Desert Storm, we decided to do our own version, in our part of the world. But we knew that Mexican authorities don’t have a sense of humor, so such an event would be highly dangerous. The beginnings were really slow. We had to know the area and be sure that this is what we wanted; we had to make sure nobody would get hurt and, if possible, find a way to avoid the confiscation of our limited gear. In preparation, I wrote a screenplay in a UCLA extension course: the story started with a borderhack on both sides of the line. Screenwriting and thinking were as much as we could do at the time. A year and a half later, we found out that Alexei Shulgin was coming to Los Angeles to an event that Natalie Bookchin, a net.artist, was organizing as part of &lt;net.net.net.&gt;, a series of lectures and presentations sponsored by the California Institute of the Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in LA. So I extended an invitation to Alexei to do an event in Tijuana. He said yes. We hoped that preparing for the 386 dx project of Alexei Shulgin was going to be the initial act of an independent media lab of our own. It turned out that Alexei couldn’t come to Mexico because of visa problems: if he had crossed, he wouldn’t have been allowed to return to the US because, as a Russian citizen, he was only given a one-entry visa. So we had to think of some way to make this happen. Natalie Bookchin set up a list with members of RTMark, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, Taco Shop Poets, and Cinemátik. Soon we had the solution: Alexei would perform <span class="lightEmphasis">on</span> the border.</p>
<p>In the message we sent to Nettime and other mailing lists (“Cyberpunk Rock Knows No Borders”), we described our plan for the performance: “Shulgin will perform on the manicured lawn of Border Fields State Park, in the company of the uniformed gun-slinging men and women of the US Border Patrol, who will likely be patrolling the area for illegal Mexican immigrants. It is expected that the Patrol will execute a synchronous “ballet” for Shulgin’s music by driving their distinctive white and green vehicles in the Tijuana river floodplain behind the artist.” Since borders have become more permeable for products and less passable for people, we observed that Shulgin’s computer would be allowed to travel freely between Mexico and the USA without a visa, but Shulgin himself would have to remain behind the chain-link fence that separates his hosting country, the land of equal opportunity, from Mexico.</p>
<p>At the performance, featuring Shulgin’s computer-generated multimedia show, we had to check the area for places where we could borrow electricity. In our view, the event was a hit, even if Alexei had to leave the area before the event started because the border patrol asked him to leave. Fortunately we had the computer on the Mexican side, and this was all we needed to keep the show going on. There were a few incidents that we learned from, including a clever Mexican opposition who were doing a binational <span class="foreignWord">posada</span> by throwing candy among our electronics and cables hoping the kids would flood in and damage the equipment. After the attempted candy sabotage, the US border patrol turned on one of their best weapons against the electronic equipment supporting our borderhack: water sprinklers. After this first event, Natalie Bookchin and I decided to work jointly, and the &lt;net.net.net.mx&gt; series was born. Each of the lecturers and artists coming to participate in Los Angeles would also come to Tijuana. In discussion with people like Geert Lovink, Ursula Biemann, and Florian Schneider, the borderhack was born.</p>
<p>Excerpt from the Borderhack! Manifesto:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">That is why we propose this Borderhack, a camp that does not pretend to destroy the border, but, in a worst case scenario, only to make us conscious of it. In the world of computers, Hacking is understood as the penetration, exploration or investigation of a system with the goal of understanding it, not of destroying it, and that is exactly what we are trying to do: to understand the border, to know what it represents and to become aware of the role that we play in it. All this with the goal of improving the relations between two worlds, the first and the third, Mexico and the US. We want not only to understand why this relationship has suffered under the influence of certain sectors of society that have fostered a climate of violence and racism, but also to understand the strange attraction that unites us. And what better way to accomplish this than by doing it right on the physical border?, spending three days trying to get to the bottom of the problem and really understand what is it that unites us and what is it that separate us.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">We resign ourselves to looking through store windows as if they were postcards from Europe, knowing that we could only reach the other side in our dreams.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The border is unilateral, only when going from Mexico to the US. The other way around is a free zone: with no need for visas, tune ups, secondary inspections or paid permits. The border exists only when going North. The wall is “one way”. Our exchange rate is 10 to 1 in favor of the dollar, of the Americans. And then, at the end of the day we ask ourselves, <span class="foreignWord">kein mensch ist illegal</span> (no one is illegal)? Or are we all illegal?</p>
<h2>The festival</h2>
<p>Why borderhack? I try to think of an explanation that doesn’t involve the actual hype of fashionable hacktivism, media activism, and political circus. For sure the answer doesn’t involve terms and acronyms like `digital divide’ or `wto,’ `imf,’ `fuck the usa,’ `windows is not cool,’ or even `capitalism is dead’. To be sincere, we do know that the particular struggle of such a border action is so doomed that we try as hard as we can to economize resources in every possible way. Borderhackers also have a life. That is an important thing to remember: we can’t always be involved in transnational sabotage or para-military media festivals. With that in mind, we strive to ensemble together, or better yet, “assemble” ourselves (as we also by “assembly” name the labor of workers just south of the border in this NAFTA time) in a festival of three days, but with effects that can last for as long as a year. And still to construct durable things amidst the entropy of an interzone is no easy task.</p>
<p>During the first Borderhack we tried to penetrate and understand the border with a very critical mindset, acknowledging the strange attractions that keep people from both sides of the border together and at the same time apart. We tried to stay apart from the clichés of border activism. There is a reason why Mexicans gamble their lives in order to become American citizens. When people gamble their lives in the desert, river, freeway, etc., in order to “find a better future” in another country, it’s because their situation has reached a limit.</p>
<p>One thing is true. The border isn’t as real as when you are next to it. The rusted metal borderwall goes all the way into the Pacific Ocean; the helicopters fly in the skies; the border patrols are everywhere. Next to the wall, there’s no way you can deny or even forget that you are on the verge of a world. You can almost play back images of families running on Interstate 5 in order to catch up to their wonderful future…brown indigenous characters at U.S. Customs repeating “American citizen” like a scratched record…students crossing the border every morning to attend school. The wall reminds you this is as far as you can get; one more step requires credentials, permits, and so on.</p>
<p>But once you pass the wall, you find a lot of bytes from the other side floating around, and they’re constantly causing failures and fatal exceptions to the machine. Files get lost in the transaction, tension-causing riots in the actual hard drive. You find a Mexican California, and a Californified Mexico. The border is always hacking itself.</p>
<p>Don’t be misled; hacking is not destroying. Hacking is done in order to get to know the system better. The system is always repaired by people who hack the system to understand it. Borderhack is a camp where the world of technology and the Internet - tools of limit erasure - meet with the world of physical borders and passport handicaps. Hacktivists, Internet artists, cyberculture devotees, border activists, electronic musicians, and punk rockers can crash the border on Tijuana-San Diego if only for a few days, with java applets, port scans, radio, microwaves, ISDN, face-to-face communication, technology workshops, presentations, music events.</p>
<p>The idea to synthesize the camp is born out of the condition of dilettante border kids, years of crossing the border and doing a little window shopping, pretending that we could be part of the American Dream of wealth, happiness, and freedom. We are confused by it and also we accept it. On one side, the malls are filled with happiness, and on the other - the wrong side - we are forever condemned to produce goods that we will never enjoy ourselves.</p>
<p>Our border is where we almost live in the U.S. We can smell the future coming from the freeways, from Silicon Valley, from Hollywood, yet we are trapped in a muddy hill with unpaved streets. We are the good neighbors of the U.S., always here, always smiling, ready to serve the next margarita. And ready to delete this border.</p>
<p><span class="foreignWord">Amor. Vida. Evolución. Siempre. Viva la revolución de los colores!</span></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/hacktivism">hacktivism</a>, <a href="/tags/borderhack">borderhack</a>, <a href="/tags/mexican">Mexican</a>, <a href="/tags/immigration">immigration</a>, <a href="/tags/border">border</a>, <a href="/tags/hack">hack</a>, <a href="/tags/united-states">united states</a>, <a href="/tags/america">america</a>, <a href="/tags/mexico">mexico</a>, <a href="/tags/cold-war-0">cold war</a>, <a href="/tags/baja">baja</a>, <a href="/tags/california">california</a>, <a href="/tags/disneyland">disneyland</a>, <a href="/tags/sixties">sixties</a>, <a href="/tags/soviet">soviet</a>, <a href="/tags/timothy-leary">timothy leary</a>, <a href="/tags/william-burroughs">william burroughs</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator838 at http://electronicbookreview.comConspiracy and the Populist Imaginationhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/paranoid
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Timothy Melley</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Conspiracy theory has a long history in the political culture of the United States. But in the last decade or two, “the paranoid style in American politics,” as political historian Richard Hofstadter called it in 1963, has kicked into high gear. Major magazines and newspapers have repeatedly called attention to America’s “conspiracy mania” (Marin and Gegax) - not only the flourishing of a “new paranoid style in the American arts” (Kakutani) but also the growing sense that conspiracy is now “a dominant theme of everyday life” (Hoover). “This,” says a character in Don DeLillo’s <span class="booktitle">Running Dog</span> (1978), “is the age of conspiracy.”</p>
<p>While many cultural observers have proclaimed the centrality of conspiracy theory, few sensitive and interesting treatments of it exist. Recycling Hofstadter’s model of mental illness, critics have tended to view conspiracy theory as a monolithic form, one best treated with skepticism, disdain, or even government surveillance and repression. Daniel Pipes’s <span class="booktitle">Conspiracy</span> (1997), for instance, asserts that ” <span class="lightEmphasis">conspiracy theory</span> is the fear of a nonexistent conspiracy. <span class="booktitle">Conspiracy</span> refers to an act, <span class="lightEmphasis">conspiracy theory</span> to a perception” (21). By this absurd definition, conspiracy theories are always wrong and thus the “act” of conspiracy can only be theorized by a lunatic. In a similar if more nuanced argument, psychologists Robert Robins and Jerrold Post outline a host of reasons to be worried about expressions of “political paranoia.” To their credit, Robins and Post concede that “political paranoia is seldom a complete delusion” (50). Yet, as evidence that “paranoid” claims occasionally have merit, they point to the case of Soviet dissidents who were wrongly imprisoned as mental patients until correctly deemed sane political prisoners by a team of (presumably objective) U.S. investigators - a case that only underscores the basic opposition between “political paranoia” and dominant American political views.</p>
<p>Mark Fenster’s <span class="booktitle">Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture</span> is a welcome exception to this trend. Fenster treats conspiracy theory as a populist theory of power, a form whose appeal stems from its recognition of real inequities in contemporary society and its expression of “desire for a politics in which ‘the people’ can affectively and effectively engage” (62). Treatments of the “paranoid style,” Fenster argues, cannot account for conspiracy theory’s pervasive presence in contemporary cultural forms (films, novels, television shows, web sites, and even board games). Nor can they tell us why conspiracy theory has become so popular or what it reveals about political subjectivity. In place of such dismissals, Fenster suggests, we need to regard conspiracy theories as a symptom of actual political and social conditions. “Just because overarching conspiracy theories are wrong does not mean that they are not on to something,” he remarks (67). And what they are “on to,” it turns out, is a progressive and utopian vision of an inclusive political culture.</p>
<p>Yet Fenster is no apologist for conspiracy theorists. If conspiracy theory stems from a utopian impulse, it also contains elements that frustrate progressive political analysis. Fenster spends considerable energy unraveling the internal illogic of this discourse, its contradictory strands of utopian yearning, social critique, and political protest. While conspiracy theory articulates a critique of powerful institutions, it departs from progressive analysis by substituting a simplistic populist vision of antagnoism between “the people” and “the elites” for a truly detailed analysis of complex power structures.</p>
<p>One of the most curious features of this substitution - one that Fenster treats only in passing - is its conservation of intentionalism. In the conspiracy theorist’s view, things always happen because someone (or something) <span class="emphasis">wills</span> them to happen. This relentless need to understand social and political outcomes as the product of intentions suggests that conspiracy theory expresses not only certain political wishes, but also nostalgia for a liberal philosophical vision, one that emphasizes the free will of subjects in competition with a monolithic social order. Fenster’s approach to conspiracy supports this interpretation by tracing Hofstadter’s “anti-paranoid” ideology to the consensus political science and history of the Cold War era. It is precisely this ideology, with its purported rationalism and objectivity, that conspiracy theory aims to challenge through its classically liberal celebration of self-determination against the power of “society” writ large.</p>
<p>Fenster’s book traces this sort of celebration through a wide array of communities and discourses, from popular novels and films to forms of play, such as conspiracy “games.” While a few chapters, particularly those on right-wing militia and Christian groups, are more reportorial than analytical, and hence less interesting, most offer new primary materials and theoretical approaches. One of the best chapters treats conspiracy narrative as a form of hyperactive semiosis. Fenster argues that conspiracy narrative is motivated by a paradoxical desire both to unearth the motive cause of complex social effects and to keep that cause at arm’s length. “If satisfaction is defined as the proof and public recognition of the ‘truth’ of conspiracy and the efficacious remedy of the crisis,” he argues, “then conspiracy theory demands dissatisfaction” (89-90), since <span class="lightEmphasis">incessant</span> interpretive activity is the theorist’s real goal. This vision of the bottomless pit of conspiratorial interpretation leads Fenster into a provocative consideration of conspiracy theory as a model of Lacanian desire, and hence an endlessly productive form of discourse. “Productive” here does not mean productive of real political change. Rather, as Fenster makes clear, conspiracy theory’s perpetual interpretive quests become a substitute for “meaningful political engagement” (80) - a problem heightened by the solitary nature of such theoretical pursuits.</p>
<p>No doubt, conspiracy theory does deter collective political struggle, in part because conspiracy theory stems directly from the “anti-social” values of liberal individualism. Yet, plenty of instances exist in which the conspiratorial mindset may be traced directly to direct political action (the Oklahoma City and Unabomber crimes come to mind). While Fenster does not ignore such outcomes, his analysis occasionally falters when he assumes that conspiracy theory, for all its surface variability, has a monolithic logic, a consistent set of rules, limits, and internal contradictions. While general tendencies exist, it seems important to distinguish the endless deferral of the <span class="booktitle">X-Files</span> from the “anti-conspiratorial” acts of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.</p>
<p>This tendency toward generalized description might also have been minimized if Fenster had treated the more complex writings of postwar writers such as William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, Joseph McElroy, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. While the latter two receive occasional mention, Fenster does not seriously engage their writings. This is unfortunate, because their novels of social conditioning, conspiracy, and social control are more nuanced - and have been far more influential - than the sources on center stage here. These objections, however, should not diminish Fenster’s accomplishment. On the whole, <span class="booktitle">Conspiracy Theories</span> is a wide-ranging, impressively researched, and intelligent book, one that accounts for both the political and cultural dimensions of its subject. Readers from diverse backgrounds will appreciate its careful handling of conspiracy culture. By remaining sensitive to the aspirations behind even the wackiest of conspiracy theories, Fenster is able to provide a compelling critical analysis of this increasingly visible and important political “style.”</p>
<p>—————————————————————</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>DeLillo, Don. <span class="booktitle">Running Dog</span>. New York: Knopf, 1978.</p>
<p>Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” <span class="booktitle">The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays</span>. New York: Knopf, 1965. 3-40.</p>
<p>Hoover, Bob. “Conspiracy Theories are Sign of the Times.” <span class="booktitle">Toledo Magazine</span> (24 March 1996): A1+.</p>
<p>Kakutani, Michiko. “Bound By Suspicion.” <span class="booktitle">New York Times Magazine</span> (19 January 1997): 16.</p>
<p>Marin, Rick and T. Trent Gegax. “Conspiracy Mania Feeds Our Growing National Paranoia.” <span class="booktitle">Newsweek</span> (30 December 1996): 64-71.</p>
<p>Pipes, Daniel. <span class="booktitle">Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From</span>. New York: Free Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Robins, Robert S. and Jerrold M. Post. <span class="booktitle">Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred</span>. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/delillo">delillo</a>, <a href="/tags/conspiracy">conspiracy</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-hofstadter">richard hofstadter</a>, <a href="/tags/timothy-melley">timothy melley</a>, <a href="/tags/mark-fenster">mark fenster</a>, <a href="/tags/paranoia">paranoia</a>, <a href="/tags/paranoid">paranoid</a>, <a href="/tags/cold-war-0">cold war</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator722 at http://electronicbookreview.com